Releases a joint video on 4/20, lol

Instantly subbed when you said all your tolerances for each feature. So useful.

That's CAD was *chef's kiss*

This is awesome! That curved dovetail with a lock is especially sweet. Taking a concept from the woodworking world and creating something that can't practically be done with wood, but is easily done with 3D printing. Really appreciate the great ideas!

Really cool. One advantage of the dovetail in woodworking is that the joint stays tight as the wood expands and contracts with changes moisture content and temperature - not such an issue with plastics. I would love to see some heuristic strategies around which joints to use under which types of loads. In this video it looks like you are making longer rods which could see very different stress patterns depending on use. It would be interesting to hear which styles cope with which stress patterns best.

Absolutely awesome tutorial Mike! The creation of joining pieces seems to be something of an art that is often overlooked in a world where we can just buy larger printers, but I think you've really opened up a lot of opportunities for those with smaller build area printers here.

This helped me so much. Using Dovetails to join a cup portion of a cup holder with the clip portion allowed me to print the clip in the correct orientation so the layer lines were perpendicular to the bending motion. Had to replace 13 cup holders with my new design incorporating the dovetail but they are strong AF now and these joins have completely opened up my mind for designing parts now.

Those are not only really strong, but also very attractive joints. The beauty of dovetails, and even more so when you make them with sweeping edges!

I've been using dove tails in my designs for a while but that one along a curve is pretty sick. Thanks for sharing it!

8:20 this joint made me audibly go "oooo" when it clicked into place.

Great video. Love the hidden sliding tapered dovetails

First time viewer, KZfaq finally put one of your videos in a feed for me which seems like a no brainer as I watch a lot of wordworking and 3d printing videos. The work you mention in your intro truly does come through, as the video surely does not suck.

Hi Mike, This was so beautiful to watch. I used to build modified timber Frame homes and fun timber frame like furniture. My body doesn’t want to do that kind of thing anymore even though my mind does. I also have worked with the blind for the past 30 years and ‘recently’, ten years, started playing, designing, exploring board games and how to accessorize, make accessible, and bling out in that hobby subculture. This video almost made me cry to see how beautiful and functional we can make things. Thanks so much for the inspiration. Can’t wait to delve deeper into your channel :)

Great Video, and very generous of you to share the Fusion files. Thank you.

First time seeing one of your videos in my feed. Instant sub! I think the 3D printing community can learn a lot from the woodworking community.

Your content is AMAZING, Mike!

This video might be the most useful video i have ever watched on 3D printing and ive been obsessed with this hobby for 6 or so years. Good shit bro

Wow thanks for including the files. Really helps from someone learning 360!

It’s nice to see people taking INSPIRATION from other making techniques and not just copying them. Metal / woodworking techniques and designs really don’t translate directly to 3d printing.

This video was amazing, subscribing immediately. I only took a year of CAD in HS so actually showing your process is AMAZINGLY helpful. Thnaks again!!!

Loved it! very valuable content for who makes a lot of split parts prints! My fav is the second, it looks strong against even torsions.

thanks for your tutorial and the Fusion Files:, that helps me a lot!!!

Thank you for sharing your experiences! An excellent video, very well explained and yet not unnecessarily drawn out... perfect 👌. Another video with stress testing of the various connections would be very interesting.

Okay I'm impressed, I didn't see the point due to having a large printer but these actually look incredible on top of being useful

Excellent video! Very informative.

Awesome tips!! Thank you.

Thank you, great tips.

Very cool concepts explained here that cannot be easily made in wood!

Great Video!

That’s awesome, very creative, love your process!!

Joining smaller parts together is a best practice for functional 3d prints anyway, as even if you have a huge printer, you don't want to carry any stresses across the layer lines, making orientation super important. Just as important as grain orientation in woodworking.

I was just interested in improving my straight dovetail game and you went well beyond. I just finished designing my first curved dovetail and the printer is heating up. Yeehaw!

Your channel always manages to teach me something that I didn't realize I needed to know. 👍

wow! great video. I'll be building some of my own this morning.

This is really great, thanks. I don't understand the taper but maybe I just need to visualize it.

Very inspiring. I really gotta learn CAD.

This was informative and short, a very good production. Well done!

Cool, this is exactly what I needed to find today.

Excellent video. It will take me some time to properly implement, but this is exactly the information I've been looking for. Thank you

I love your scarfed and circular dovetail solutions, those look like awesome joints for different situations. I also like the idea of tapering along the length of the dovetail because they can get vaery stiff trying to put them together otherwise. I lot of very good information here, thank you. I find the classic mistake a lot of designers make is to not fillet the corners. I would say the smallest radius curve possible is around half the nozzle diameter, but I find in practice that the fillet radius shoudl be at least the nozzle diameter and it doesn't really hurt anything to go much higher, say 1mm as this eliminates any bulging at the vertices, which means you can have tight clearances everywhere else. On one of my designs (drawer units that slot together) I used a double-ended dovetail spline (sort of like a butterfly) that slides into slots on the drawer cabinets, and on that I made the fillet almost half the width of the dovetail, to it looks more like a "bone" shape, almost a figure-8 cross section but stretched in the middle. It was experimental but it worked really well in practice, easy to insert and remove yet holds the cabinbets together tightly and doesn't fall out. I wish I could post images here, I'd post a screen shot of the design, I hope my description makes sense.

Good topic and well explained. Would be nice with a follow up video where you test the strengths of the joints. Thanks for sharing 👍🏼

I REALLY need to start learning fusion

Thank YOU! 👍👍 I'm going to give it a try 💪💪

Lots of great info packed into this video! Subbed!

Really good stuff!

Awesome video! Very good content!

Quick note for other viewers: don’t orient dovetails in the Z axis where tension will get put across layer boundaries. Do it like this video, where the dovetail is primarily on the XY plane. In Fusion 360 it makes me nuts that there’s not a simple operation for “this part mates to that part with [x] clearance.” Instead you have to model the clearances or do a bunch of push/pull operations. I tend to do the former because it keeps the dimensions in the sketches vs. in the dialog boxes of push/pull operations. But the latter is quicker. Really excellent video-instant subscribe from me!

that is very nice! i would love to see a video where you show a few use cases of these for some designs!

thats so cool combining woodworking know how with 3d printing

You can also put a dovetail shaped hole through perpendicular to the joint in the elongated dovetail to put a dutchman joint in there for even more strength.

You can also make a compound dovetail, or tapered like violins and some guitars have on the arm joint, it makes so that it really locks together with the advantage of easy disassemble if needed.

Great video! really well thought out.

Your videos do not suck. Good stuff

Great video!

Keep up with the quality videos!

Great video 👍

Beautiful

Amazing, loved the content, subscribed!

Very well explained, thanks so much :-)

Thank you, I shall use what i have learned here :)

Cool video today very nice joinery, thank you for sharing!

This is a fascinating experiment, and I really appreciate the technical detail. Convinced me to subscribe. Cheers!

Great design work and video presentation. As an engineer, I loved this

Those dovetail joints are amazing! Wow!!! Maybe some will get incorporated into a slicer. I just recently discovered the dovetail in Bambu studio and it’s very easy to us and is far superior to other ways I have employed to joining parts.

brilliant!

Loved it! This video made me subscribe to your channel!

this is a great video!

Cool video

Solid! ❤

Very nicely done. Clear, good explanations, nice level of detail. You just gained another subscriber. 😀

I would love to see a collaboration with @CNCKitchen to test the strength of the printed joints in different load scenarios and print orientations.

Great content. Did my part towards your 2025 goal and cheering for you! I like that you provide lots of visuals that present the topic. I am biased and just came from a year of sudden interest in woodworking YT channels, along with Damascus knife making vidoes and your channel ticks some really niche boxes for me.

great video !

Please do more on joints. Dowel, maybe biscuit joints. Can you test them with weight? Glue strength difference? Love to see it. Great video.

at 4:48 is the perfect opportunity to use the Intersect mode of the extrude command. it removes the need to create additional sketch profiles.

Good video. There's an easier way to split a body with a dovetail cut in Fusion 360: 1) Start with a solid body 2) On a sketch, draw the squiggly line representing where a blade would cut to make the dovetail. Include fillets at any sharp edges. 3) In the top menu, switch from the SOLID tab to the SURFACE tab 4) "Extrude" the squiggly line, so that it forms a surface that divides the body you want to cut 5) Go back to the SOLID tab, choose MODIFY / Split Body 6) For "Body to Split" select your solid part. For "Splitting Tool(s)" select your surface. (Works best if you select them using the part tree on the left) 7) Click ok and it will split your part. You can then press/pull to add clearance.

That elongated one is fantastic. Put those pieces in a box for a product sold with some assembly required and you wouldn't need assembly instructions.

Cool video.. would love to see some ideas for flat / curved surfaces joints

Damn, I’m definitely stealing this for my future designs. Awesome video!

These are super useful joints. I only wish you would make another deep dive video spending a bit more time showing the design and modelling phase. In particular of the cylindrical rotating dovetail joint!

good stuff my dude.

I've been using a dowel pin system just to keep things lined up where they need to be. This seems a more elegant solution.

genius idea

That curved dovetail with the stop in the thumbnail is a thing of beauty. You should sell prints of that photo, it’s engineering art. 🎉 Great video as well, your attention to detail and planning is demonstrated through the video quality itself let alone the content.

lovely

très très intéressant, merci :)

Awesome video and great presentation and demonstration. New subscriber!

Nice technique! What I would do is to put a hole (maybe countersunk) in the dovetail stop, and a nut/threaded hole in the dovetail itself. Then, after assembly you could lock the parts together with a screw :)

The snapping dovetail is interesting, keeps dimensionality while having a removable joint, depending on the strength of th snap. Makes me think of using a combination of a dovetail with locating dutchman inserts. Perhaps the next step of this would be a sprung detent within the interior faces, so that the dovetail itself has a tractile resistance before snapping into and out of place, without needing a compliant snap at the end of the rail.

Dovetails are good for a lot of things because of how precisely and securely they can hold. If you are making removable or modular parts then even just a basic straight dovetail can be good because you only need a way to secure it against linear movement in the direction the dovetail is inserted since the dovetail itself prevents all other movements. Basically dovetails secure against all movements except their insertion movement, so your curved examples will be fine for all motions except rotation in that axis, which allows you to design the shape of the dovetail for the expected forces in your application. I have used dovetails for connecting the legs on a hexapod robot. The legs are made as their own removable system (to allow fast removal or replacement of legs) that can attach onto the body using dovetails. The dovetails don’t go all the way through (to help locate the parts vertically) and have a hole in them for passing wires through. I have two methods of locking them in the vertical direction, the first is just with some bolts normal to the attachment surface/plane, the second method is when the top plate of the robot is connected it prevents the dovetails from being able to lift out again so they are capped at the bottom and top and bolting the top plate down holds them tightly. I also have used dovetails for modular attachment points for cameras or sensors and hey have been held in place with the same methods I described above. An interesting idea that came to me whilst watching this was for a dovetail that works by twisting the parts together, basically a dovetail (probably better using two) that is swept along a circular path in the plane where the parts join.

This is brilliiant. I'm only upset that I didn't think of it myself.

In the Malay language, we call this "tanggam". Back in the old days, our houses were all made of wood, so we had to use these shapes.

Cool video. One thing I would recommend in the video editing department is to just record some background noise while you're not talking so that when you have to pause the audio, such as when describing multiple things and waiting for the animations to complete, you can fill that with the background noise so the cuts aren't so noticible

It would be really cool to see these tested in their different dimensions (compression, tension, lateral movement in comparison to a full length object and worst case scenario loads).

Great content, well done

Thanks!

Very clever technique for joining 3D printed objects, got yourself another subscriber here, looking forward to seeing your other videos, good luck on the 100k goal!

I think all of these would be better if also *keyed,* especially scarf connection that has no compression strength. So different ways to do keying would make for a nice continuation video

0.3 mm and 0.2mm radius for inner anr outter joint , nice, got it

Hello, great video. I'm new to CAD. Do you push/pull the 0.2mm on both parts/sides of the dovetails? I could only see you doing it to one side in the video. Will my joints be too loose if I do it to both parts? Also, do you think it would be okay to do 0.3mm fillet on both internal and external edges?