3DPrinting
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Use blender, it's free and can easily merge stls.
How would I go about doing this? Any tutorials you can point me to?
Open stl #1 in blender, then open #2. Save it as a new stl.
But then the pieces aren't lined up. And if I line them up to the keys it still leaves slight space inside the keyhole which creates pockets and suction during printing
To avoid the gaps you can line them up with an overlap.
You can adjust the vertices of the model slightly to help facilitate this. The most natural-feeling way to do it in Blender is by using the Sculpt mode.
You can use a Boolean addition operation to then make the two models a single piece of geometry. Or not bother (if you are printing on FDM or at 100% infill in resin, it won't really hurt either way).
This feels like the way to go. Any tips on where to find a tutorial for doing this in blender? Or even just what I should google lol
This is subtractive rather than additive but I ended up following this video vaguely as a start when I was doing keychains. Cad packages weren't enjoying the vector image. I ended up creating an stl for the components (text, image and body) and merging them with a boolean operation, think this might help you get started as I had no idea where to even look.
At the very simplest, you can just overlap things in the slicer without Blender.
If you want to learn about Blender's Sculpt mode, you can just Google "Blender Sculpt mode tutorial". For convenience, try to use the most recent results, as the interface can be slightly different in older versions.
Sculpt mode effectively allows you to alter the models as if they were made of clay or plasticine.
A lot of the tutorials will be showing how to make things from scratch, but what's important is that you see how the tools work.
Once you have everything overlapping the way you want, you can join the using a Boolean operation. You'll want to use a "union" operation.
Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate it. I'll give some blender tutorials a look.
Your issue is certainly that the designer of your model left clearances between the parts to ensure that they would fit together. This is proper and correct, because otherwise you'd never be able to physically assemble the parts here in physical reality. Some amount of tolerance is required since no printer is 100% accurate, and a total interference fit would not work with most materials anyway. The problem is, when printing as a single unitary piece that's not what you need anymore.
You'll have to modify the models to close these gaps, or just insert your own solid object in between them to take up the gaps and then export the whole assemblage as a single object.
Most slicers can do this, although typically the objects they can create out of thin air are only geometric primitives (cubes, spheres, cylinders, etc.) so you might not be able to create the right sized object or otherwise you'll have to use a whole dickton of them.
Oh I get why is it done that way, just a pain to put back together aha. I'll give filling in the key holes a try. Seems like the easiest solution. Don't know why I didn't think of that aha.
Open a new blender project. From the drop down menus along the top, Select open, import, import STL, then find your first stl in the file explorer. Repeat this to import the second stl. Drag and rotate both objects until they're lined up how you want them. Select both stls at the same time. Right click and select "merge". Then in the drop down menus, find export, export as STL. Save it as your new STL. Open this new stl in your preferred slicer program, and you're good to go!