I shouldn’t be so proud of a nut and bolt, but it’s cool. When cocked to one side the nut will slide over the thread. Snugged down, pressure keeps it aligned.
Works on a 3D filament printer. Makes a good fidget toy.
With a lot of head-scratching. Also it started with models from the McMaster catalog: an M16 50mm screw and an M16 48mm coupling nut.
To shorten the nut to 24mm I made a copy, slid it over 24mm, and intersected the two. That works because 24mm is a multiple of the thread pitch.
I had to export to Fusion 360 to enlarge the nut 6% in X and Y. I intersected the enlarged nut with the original to make one with the relaxed thread but the original outer dimensions. The thread is about 1mm larger, which seems to work on calibrated and uncalibrated printers.
There are four bodies, plus sketches, in the “Cutters” folder:
One is a 16mm-plus-6% cylinder, centered and coaxial with the nut, then turned 10° to the side.
Two more are thin wedges that, together, make a bowtie prism. That makes room for the screw to shift. Without them you can slip it through at an angle, or thread it on, but you can’t get from one state to the other.
The last is an elliptical cylinder, a squished, unrotated copy of the cylinder cutter. It cuts off some ugly sharp edges.
