TinkerCAD Tutorial- Basics of navigating TinkerCAD

1. To begin, go to Tinkercad.com. Before creating your project, make a free account. Then you will be directed to the dashboard page. Here you can edit old projects and create new ones. For our keychain select Create New Design.

2. Once selected, you will be directed to TinkerCad’s workplane. This is a 3D workspace that can be used to create your projects. To begin the keychain, go to the Basic shapes menu and select the cylinder.

3. Drag it onto your workplane. This cylinder is already sized. You can measure it in one of three ways. First, you can use the grid to measure your workspace. You can see that by going to Edit Grid we are measuring in millimeters. The cylinder takes up 2 by 2 squares meaning it is 20mm by 20mm.

4. You can also check this using our ruler. Select the ruler above the shapes menu and

place it near your cylinder. You will see that the cylinders measurements automatically populate.

5. Lastly, an unconventional way to estimate the size of your item is my placing a common household item next to your project. For example, by going to the shapes menu under Making at Home you can place a tissue roll in your workspace. Using this you can estimate the relative size of our project.

6. Other buttons useful for navigating the workspace include the Home View button that changes the view back to the standard view, a Fit all in View button that will adjust the view depending on the space of your objects, a Zoom in button, a Zoom out button, and a button that changes the view to flat. In addition, in the top left corner of the screen there is a cube that you can rotate to rotate the screen around your workspace. Using these buttons and your mouse, you can control the view of your workspace.

7. Now that you can navigate TinkerCAD, begin editing our cylinder to create our keychain. First, resize the cylinder. Select the square buttons at the corner of the object and adjust it so that it is wide and flat. Next move it up so that it hovers just above the workplane by using the arrow above the object.

8. Next, add letters to the keychain. Go back to the shapes menu and select Text and numbers. Place a U, N, C, and W on the workspace and group them using the Group button at the top.

9. Next resize the letters so that they are thicker than the keychain and select hole. Place the now translucent letters so that they span the width of the whole keychain.

10. Highlight the cylinder and letters and select the group button. You will see that the letters disappear and in place of them there are holes in the keychain shaped as the letters. We are going to do the same thing for the hole of the keychain by creating a small cylinder and placing it at the top of the keychain.

11. As you can see, we now have a small simple keychain that you can print using a 3D printer.