How to do a dovetail like shape

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Hi all… So things are progressing with my playing around with Shapr… What I’m attempting to do at this point and part of my difficulty is wrapping my brain around how to do this… I want to do something like a dovetail slot in a piece I’m working on. I’ve got the 6mm slot defined but not sure what the best approach is to create the dovetail…What I’m ultimately trying to do is to have two pieces that will slide into each other to be temporarily connected as a single item, hence the desire for a dovetail which would lock the two together through a sliding mechanism.

In this case this will NOT be used for wood but for plastic parts 3D printed. I’m attaching a picture of the channel I’ve created in the main part. It’s 6mm wide and about 65mm long. The 2nd piece should have a matched mating surface that will slide down the length of the channel and NOT fall out. The only way to remove the two parts from each other is to slide them apart again. Hopefully I didn’t completely confuse you… Thx in advance for any direction that you can provide…!

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I’ve used a dovetail on 3D printed parts. I drew the dovetail profile, used offset to create the matching profile, making sure the offset was for the clearance required by the printer, e.g. 0.3 mm and then used the profiles to remove material from the respect bodies.
Hope that helps

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In short form…

I‘d use a trapezoid sketch, extrude it (perhaps you‘ll have to subtract something, if hollowing out is needed) and subtract the extruded form from the other body…

Do you get my idea?

Cheers Chris

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Thanks guys… I’ll try out your suggestions shortly… Thanks so much!!

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Greetings,

Here are 2 simple examples of how to make your dovetail.
First method- Via the sketch, create a body with the male dovetail. Hide it. Create the 2nd body with the sketch.
Second method- create that first body with the dovetail. Hide it. Create a 2nd rectangular body. Bring back the first body. Use the Subtract tool. Select the 2nd body, click next, select the 1st body, select keep original, click done. Done!

Note: make sure to remove material from the female part of the dovetail to allow for dimensional errors/tolerances in 3D printing.

-Mike

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Thanks Mike… I’ll probably see about giving this a try tomorrow…

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