Thanks to the great feedback I received on my previous post where I introduced the concept design of a STEEM GEAR fidget toy, I am very happy to show you today the printed result.

As you see I made some changes to the initial design thanks to the feedback received from you. My kids and I love playing with it and I think this model is up to date one of my favourite prints.

In the following section I will give you a brief overview of the design process. The model was made in Fusion360 and later printed with my Prusa i3 MK2s printer.

Sketch in Affinity Designer

Before I started modelling in Fusion360 I created a sketch in Affinity Designer. I find this a ver handy tool if you need to create more complicated sketches rather than sketching in Fusion360. I made sure that I aligned the gears properly to each other in order for them to work properly once printed. After a short while the sketch was done and saved as an .svg file in order to us in Fusion360.

Modeling in Fusion360

After the sketch has been imported in Fusion it was a just a matter of Extruding the various parts. In order to give the gears some space to rotate freely around the towers I added a 0.3mm offset.

For the cover I projected the shape to a layer above the model and added the text. I used the Extrude tool again but this time selected the cut option instead of join to remove the letters from the top part.

The final thing to before I could save it and send it to the printer was to apply some fillers to round the sharp edges.

3d Printing

Printing the various parts took in total about 4 hours. I used various colours which makes the model more interesting to look at in my opinion. After everything was printed I could finally do my favourite task, assemble the parts to the final model and test it out!

Do you like this design as well or is there anything you think need to be improved?l Let me know in the comments.

The print files are now available for free download at Thingiverse