Round Seal Making Software Trial Copies And

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Since weve hollowed out a portion of the plate, lets round the internal corners a bit.

Ive previously gone into some of the process around these plates in features on How to Integrate Tube Reservoirs and Making a Custom SLI Terminal, but thats mainly been from the perspective of somebody whos made one before.

In this article I wanted to help show the process behind designing a distro plate of your own, as ever theres also an accompanying video so you can see it all in action.

I thoroughly recommend watching it if youre interested in the subject as details can sometimes get a bit muddy in text form.

So lets hop to it Its all about the CAD This article is about designing the plates, rather than making them.

The field of manufacturing is pretty vast and things vary a lot from machine to machine, so it makes sense to divide the two topics to make them more manageable.

If youre able to design a plate to begin with, then youll have the ability either to manufacture it yourself, or pass the files on to somebody else whos capable of doing it on your behalf.

Im going to be using Fusion 360 from Autodesk, it has a great feature set and also has the bonus of being free for educational, hobbyist and small business use.

Round Seal Making Software Trial Copies And

Dont be fooled by their insistence on trial copies and so on, it is indeed free to use unless youre generating above a certain threshold from use of the software.

There are also buckets of tutorials for it online, so its usually fairly straightforward to figure out how to use a particular function.

Of course much of this will be applicable to other software packages too.

Lets get stuck in Lets go with a simple model, a rectangular reservoir with an in and out port.

This uses all of the same principles youll need for modelling a distro plate, Ill cover things like channel depths, hole spacing, feature offsets as well as throw in a few handy tips to make the process simpler and more robust.

If youve never used CAD before, then I suggest going through some beginner tutorials just to get comfortable with the layout and terminology.

Open a new design and click New Sketch, then choose the Centre Rectangle Tool (I use it a lot so have it pinned, you can normally find it in the drop down Sketch menu).

The reason for using Centre Rectangle is that its then easy to work with the origin and axes found in the sketch environment, using these is a good idea as it makes doing operations such as circular patterns, rotations or mirrors much easier.

Our reservoir is going to be 120x200mm in size, either type those numbers in when drawing the rectangle or use the Dimension Tool to assign them, after that click Stop Sketch.

Using the Extrude tool, select the rectangle and type in a value, this will be the thickness of the piece of acrylic (or other material) that you wish to use, I like to use 10mm plates.

Now that we have a thick piece of material, its time to cut out the first channel.

Click New Sketch and select the top face of the cuboid, this creates a sketch on the top surface.

Again using Centre Rectangle draw a 60x120mm rectangle from the origin of the workpiece and then Stop Sketch.

Fusion will automatically adjust things so that it cuts away material, however you can change this manually too in the dialog box.