Have you ever 3D printed a part and it wasn’t as strong as you’d hoped? Maybe before printing, you decide your part needs additional strength in one area and not another. Maybe you’re going to drill a hole or put a threaded insert inside of a part and you just wanted to add strength just to those key areas. Well, now there’s a tool that can do that without having to send the design back into your 3D CAD software. In this video blog, TriMech Application Engineer Ricky Shannon will walk through the new GrabCAD Print Advanced FDM toolset.

The GrabCAD Advanced FDM Tool

GrabCAD Print Advanced FDM features provide the consumer with a powerful but intuitive toolset to attain desired part characteristics by automatically controlling FDM build attributes. The tool combines some of the functionality of Insight into the user experience of GrabCAD, which permits customers to easily alter parts using multiple bodies and faces of the part. These options also allow users to control the style of infill, percent infill, angle of infill, number of contours, seam avoidance, self-supporting holes and inserts which modify the holes in your CAD design. All of this, without leaving GrabCAD, reduces the time it takes to prepare a job and improving the overall quality of your part.

>>Learn more about how to use the Advanced FDM tool

We can see that the Advanced FDM options added to GrabCAD are a very useful set of tools with the ability to make select changes to a design all from within the printing software. These features are already available with the latest update, so be sure to enable them in your Preferences tab under “FDM.”