The Engineering Department has asked the Design Department for a 3D design CAD drawing of a staple gun. They wish to 3D print the design at their upcoming design review. You have been assigned this task in the Design Department.

In this work instruction we will model a staple gun in the Makers Empire Advanced Module. The staple gun will have four main parts, the body, the trigger, the details, and the screws.

7. Now select the Spline tool to start drawing the curve. Click on the last point you set (the end of the diagonal line) and then draw a curve by setting a number of points and clicking. Keeping a short distance between the points helps keep the curve smooth.

8. Now finish off the shape by selecting the line tool and clicking on the last node in the curve. Draw down the right side. Click and then draw across the base, back to the first node. When you complete the shape it should fill the shape blue to indicate it’s a closed polygon.

9. Now we need to swap into Design Mode. To do this, press the Design Mode button at the top of the screen.

Once you are in Design Mode, you’ll need to Extrude the shape you’ve just drawn to turn it into a 3D shape.

To do this, you need to open the Mesh panel and select the Extrude tool.

Once you have the Extrude tool selected, click on the shape you drew in sketch mode.

You can now use the arrow gizmo to drag out the shape and turn it 3D. You can also use the Distance input field in the Extrude panel to type in exact measurements.

For this exercise, we want to extrude our shape by 1.50mm.

Now that the body is solid, let’s cut out the hole in the handle. To do this, we are going to sketch on the surface of our body, extrude our shape, then use it to cut a hole in our staple gun, creating a handle hole.

2. Now that we’re sketching on the surface of our body, let’s begin by drawing a circle.

Select the Circle tool from the Drawing panel.

Next, you need to pick where you want your handle to be. Once you’ve decided, click and hold in your chosen position. While holding down, drag out the circle until it's a nice size for the height of your handle, and release hold when finished.

3. Now we need to stretch our circle to create the handle shape. To do this we’ll need to move some of its nodes.

Modifying a drawn shape’s nodes can be done when using the Move tool from the Transform panel.

With the Move tool selected, you now need to click and drag the selection box around half of the circle’s nodes.

Then we’ll move the selected nodes to the side using the arrow gizmo to create our handle shape.

4. Now we need to turn our handle sketch into a 3D shape. The shape needs to be wider than the body so that we can use it to cut our handle hole.

5. The next step is to move the handle shape into the body and perform a Boolean cut, creating our handle hole.

Firstly, you’ll need to move your handle shape into the body. To do this, use the Move tool to move the handle into the body. Make sure that the handle is sticking out both sides of the body so that we get a clean cut. This is why we made sure the handle was wider than the body.

Next you want to open the Boolean tool.

Select the shape you wish to be the ‘cutter’, in our case it’s the handle shape. Once it’s selected, click confirm.

Now select the shape you wish to be cut, the body shape, and then click confirm.

Now that you’ve completed the main body of the staple gun, it’s time to add some details. There are four main detail points that we’ll be focusing on in this exercise.

2. Using a combination of the  Line and Spline tools, draw two closed polygons representing the trigger and front section of our staple gun. These shapes do not need to connect as they will be extruded out into two separate 3D shapes later.

When you are finished, change back to Design Mode.

3. Now use the Extrude tool again and extrude our two new shapes. The trigger should be narrower than the body of the staple gun, and the front bumper should be slightly wider.

5. Next we are going to add screws and other small details to the design. As before we need to sketch on the surface of the body, and draw our details.

For the screws, use the Circle tool, and for the other details, use the

Line or Spline tools.

7. Now that we have the smaller details extruded, we need to position them so they are in the optimal spot and connected to our design.

As before, we’ll use the Move tool and reposition our detail shapes.

8. Currently, the details are only on one side of the staple gun. To get the details over the other side, we’ll use the Clone tool from the Styling panel to duplicate the shapes.

The tool allows us to pick how far over the shape will be created. Modify the X value until the clone shape preview is on the other side of the body.

When the preview is in the right spot, click the Confirm button from the side panel.

Repeat this for all the detail shapes.

Now that the bulk of the design work is finished, all that’s left is to colour the shapes. This makes the design more readable and also helps show how it could look in the real world.