just a warning before we start. please ensure the material you use to print this does not react poorly with your glue and modelling plastic! you don't want to accidentally glue your tracks to the jig! please be careful! :)
i was putting together my first individual plastic link tracks yesterday and i thought wow a little tool to hold these straight would be nice, found one for sale and they wanted £30!
so i took some inspiration from their design and made my own very simple version in blender. this is 180mm long, with the slide allowing up to 42mm wide tracks (your dimensional accuracy may vary), biggest tracks at 1/35 i could think of were that of the maus which are around 35mm wide, so i hope this should be useful for most models.
i used an M3 10mm bolt and an M3 square nut (2.5mm wide.. i believe a regular hex nut will fit in the hole and work just as well though).
assembly is pretty straight forward, pop your bolt in the knob (i superglued mine in, i always advise a dry fit to ensure 10mm actually works for you!). pop the slide part on the base part.. nut in the bottom, screw the knob on.. done!
i printed this on an ender 3 v2 in esun cold white pla+ at .2 layer height with 20% grid infil. i sliced in cura 4.13 and used the ironing zigzag for the flat surfaces, though it would have been fine without ironing. i didn't bother with support for the nut slot which leads to some droopy plastic in there as its not a full bridge, not too difficult to clean up if needed.
oh yes, each base has a 180mm ruler along the side. i have included a numbered copy of each base that has the cm numbers along the ruler, just in case you have a very calibrated printer and want some numbers on your ruler. thought i'd add the option, why not.
the photo is version 1, i soon learned the thumbscrew feels too short at 5mm so i upped it to 10mm tall. i've also made a version with straight sides rather than the slanted because i can foresee someone wanting that. and oh yeah, my fdm printer is really not greatly calibrated so excuse my rough print :) i mostly use it for cosplay stuff so super neat printing is not required as almost everything i make is later filled and sanded anyway.
thanks to nikki81 for the simple thumbscrew model, i'm too lazy and hopeless with shapes in blender so it saved me a lot of time :)
The author remixed this model.