ruler

• Strength: I've printed models from other friends here and found that, appearance aside, I'm always dissatisfied with the ruler's thickness and strength, either it's too thin and lacks feel, easily bending and deforming, or it's too thick, increasing measurement errors when in use and. To address this, I made two small optimizations: first, designing hollow strips along the bottom long edge, which can effectively increase strength and toughness, and also save some material; second, changing the printing infill direction (originally 45° to 90°), which can effectively ensure the strength of the long edge and make the top surface look more comfortable; the ruler blank thickness is 2mm,

•  Appearance: To ensure clear printed text, I adjusted and tested multiple numerical fonts, finally selecting the “Hanyi Zongyi Simplified” font, which ensures good readability and clearly discernible printed numbers, additionally, the Z-seam position was optimized, to avoid protrusions in the measuring and drawing area. Also, I used gray instead of white for the bottom, making it more dirt-resistant! Additionally, there are a total of four different specifications of rulers to choose from, namely 20cm, 15cm, 10cm, and 10cm with a hanging hole

• Multi-color printing: This model has been optimized for multi-color printing, friends with AMS can directly select the layered color change I have configured for multi-color printing, or manually paint by layer as needed. Friends without AMS can achieve multi-color printing by adding pause layers (this should be basic knowledge, if you don't understand, you can search on Bilibili: 3d print pause layer)

• Readings: Since the goal is to design a truly useful and functional measuring ruler, the most basic measurement function is certainly the first priority, firstly, due to the limited precision of 3D printing, the 1mm endpoint is set to the left of the smallest graduation mark, rather than the middle of the mark when taking measurements, this is why the first segment is relatively larger, which maximizes measurement accuracy

• Error: Different filaments have a certain degree of print shrinkage, which is unavoidable for the finished product, I used PLA for printing and found that the maximum error within a 200mm length is < -0.5mm

• Printing issues: The graduation marks may stick together partially during the printing process, I tried reducing the graduation line width to 0.2mm and increasing settings like retraction and Z-hop, but it was still unavoidable. So my final solution was at the physical level: directly cutting them apart with a utility knife solved it perfectly 🐶, for a 20cm ruler, about 3 instances of this might occur

• Unsolvable problem: The last segment of the graduation marks is always relatively thick; observing the slicing process, this might be due to it always being printed last, leading to imprecise filament control, I've tried for a long time but still can't find how to adjust the print order to avoid this problem, If any friends know, please leave a comment and let me know! Thanks!

Related model recommendations

Standard Rulers

1. Metric 10-20cm

2. Metric 30cm

Special Rulers:

1. Braille Straight Ruler Metric/Imperial