Hi Chris, I've attached a finished up version, I think this should be ready to send out as an STL now.

One of the key things that you want to look at when you're preparing something for STL is the object type indicator - that's the label in the upper right area of the window which shows some information about the selected objects.

You want to periodically check that indicator to see if the selected object is a solid or not, and also how many different objects are selected. Do a Ctrl+A to select everything and then look over here:




Your goal for making an STL is to make that readout show that everything that was selected by Ctrl+A was just a single solid. In your previous model, if you do that you can see it says "49 objects", which means you've got a bunch of different pieces and some are solids and some are open surfaces.

So to clean things up, I started by selecting some of the large top pieces that were solids and using boolean union to combine them together into larger pieces.

Then another key thing is make sure to hide pieces if they are getting in your way, otherwise it can be difficult to see if there are holes or things when you have other pieces sitting right on top of what you are trying to work on.

Once I got all the big pieces booleaned together into one large unit, I hid that and then started to look at the bottom parts, those were the areas that needed some planes to be drawn in and joined in to finish off some parts. Then that was followed with some more boolean unions between parts to keep on combining parts together.


But try to keep track of that type indicator, that will help you to know if the thing you are currently working on is a finished and closed up solid or if it still needs some pieces to be joined into it.

I hope this helps!

- Michael