Michael K Johnson<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://fosstodon.org/@FreeCAD" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>FreeCAD</span></a></span> Yesterday, a local <a href="https://social.makerforums.info/tags/HamRadio" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>HamRadio</span></a> friend asked for help 3D printing <a href="https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4059349" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">brackets for stacking two radios</a>, and a <a href="https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5212954" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">hook to hang a microphone</a>.</p><p>Really, combining the parts made a lot of sense. So I imported both into a FreeCAD document, translated them together to the desired superposition, did the usual mesh → shape → solid, Part Boolean to join them, changed the boolean's refine to true, and now I have a bracket with a known-to-work hook the right size for the microphone.</p><p>If I had wanted to make this design more flexible, I could have re-created the design and made it parametric, but as a quick "could you print this for me?" improvement to an existing design it was very quick — most of the time was from re-orienting to Part since I operate in Part Design by preference. It took longer to arrange support exclusions to support the hook and not support the holes in the slicer than it did to combine the models in FreeCAD.</p><p>If I were modeling this from scratch, I would have designed the hook to print without supports, but then I might have had to have iterated to get to a shape known to work well with the actual microphone in practice. So this was the quick win.</p><p><a href="https://social.makerforums.info/tags/FreeCADFriday" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>FreeCADFriday</span></a></p>