How to find FREE 3D Printing models using search engines

Trying to find the perfect model to 3D Print? Did you know you can search ALL the 3D Printing repositories at once? Using these search engines - you can!

Resources:

[Frostfly]

McMaster Carr also has a HUGE number of mechanical drawings you can download. I use it a lot to get screws when I'm doing digital prototyping and I'm being far too completionist.

[David-hirp]

I really could not have got started in 3d printing with out you and your videos 5 years ago thanks mate

[RegularOldDan]

Yeggi! I've used them for years when I want to search for a particular thing across sites. They've been (and still are) an excellent resource!

[DJapan]

A lot of lighting companies have 3D versions of their lamps and such on their website. I've used that when doing architectural renderings.

[CAnsy]

3d printing wouldn't be as big as it is today, if there wasn't so many models for free. If you would have to pay for every single model, people wouldn't like that. So..thanks a ton to every modeller. Very appreciated

[dronepilotflyby]

The Grabcad homepage had what looked like a dual pinball ramp. 3D pinball playfield parts would be awesome.

[markortiz]

Just echoing what has been said: McMaster is amazing for an immense amount of hardware. Strongly recommended. Haven't found a model that I couldn't use. Sometimes their modeling technique takes some getting used to but otherwise, very solid

[stephenhobson]

Great video! For mechanical parts ServoCity have a STEP library of all their parts, I've printed gears/pulleys for bots before from there. Also, it's amazing how often "thing-I'm-looking-for stl" works as a google search

[UncleJessy]

That’s a great list! It amazes me how poorly some of the larger 3D File sites run or are just bloated with ads (looking at you Cults, MMF, & Thingiverse)

I pretty much only use Printables & Patreon now… if only someone would make a 3D File Patreon repository

[kazolar]

McMaster is also really good for mechanical parts. Can either use the parts as part of a design or modify and print

[TheSecurity]

this came in handy to find a bracket for my gazebo that nearly flew away last weekend. The bracket broke when it decided it was over being a gazebo and wanted to be a kite. I had searched thingyverse and it gave me nothing useful but used the 3dmdb and it found the exact part on thingyverse using the same search string.

[licensetodrive]

I found I'm spending more time on my own 3D print designs than finding & printing other peoples designs. Though I do love seeing other people's 3D print designs, always looking for new ideas & ways of designing.

[Veptis]

Since this video there have been noteable advancements in learning based representations for meshes and scenes. Meaning we now have text to 3D retrieval and also image to 3D etc.

GrabCAD has been very useful for me to put references into Fusion360 and then model parts on top of that. Instead of sitting there with calipers recreating my own models.

[hazonku]

Thangs has been a go to for me for a while now. It's often a lot cheaper & easier to find something there than on Turboquid or some other "proper" 3D model vendor.

[ranchranchers]

The things in those search engines are licensed. looking at there sum of the searches to see what's been done is simple enough, knowing how to upload and sell is important. Supporting the community.

[MinecraftMaker]

I didn't know about all of these - thanks for sharing!

[doomgod]

This is exactly what I needed. I just got my ender put together and had no idea where to get files to try out.

[c-eagle]

Even though not for 3D printing, but I have been looking for search engines of this kind for ages, for a browser-based hyper-dimensional grid-dungeon-crawler game (like Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Bloodwych, just without absolute spacial connections between grid fields), in order to get appropriate looking NPCs, monsters, items and so on - and it seems that 3dmdb does give a lot more results than any other website I've come across over the last 12 months. I actually had to pause development for about 5 months now, because I was unable to find ANY suitable 3d models after a while, and at that time I only had like 3 or 4 okay-ish models... barely enough to do the stories I wanted to tell. So, thank you so much for this video, it helped me a lot! :)

[jacobchristianglover]

Hello from Tampa, Florida! Thanks for the video, great information.

[ltborg]

McMaster Carr also has models files available on their website for free. There’s even integration to pull them into Fusion if you use that.