Three guided tutorials: learn KapyCAD by building the part

A month ago, opening the editor guide, we said the next thing would be tutorials you do inside the app. Here they are: three real parts, with their steps beside the viewport, that you can build right now.

What a guided tutorial is

The editor opens with the tutorial alongside. In the right-hand column, one step at a time: the written instruction, a looping clip of the gesture, and a ring around the button to press.

What matters is what it takes to move on: a step is not ticked because you pressed "next". It is ticked when the fillet, or the cut, or the clearance appears in your part — with the values the instruction asked for. There is no way to reach the end without having built anything.

You can leave halfway and come back where you were, and the part stays in your drive like any other model.

The three

A tray that spins on its stand · 10 steps

Two bodies printed in one go: a round stand with a post and a ring-shaped tray around it with one millimetre of clearance everywhere. It comes off the printer already turning, with nothing to assemble.

This is the clearance tutorial: extruding up to a face rather than to a distance you guessed, offsetting a face to open exactly the gap you want, and shelling a body leaving the wall you chose.

A parametric Gridfinity baseplate · 6 steps

You model a single cell, 42 × 42 mm, cut the socket into it with one stepped cut, and repeat it W × H.

And here is the point: W and H are not two numbers you type and forget. At the end of the tutorial you open the Parameters window and change them, and the whole plate follows. From 2 × 2 to 5 × 3 without touching the geometry again — that is what parametric means, and seeing it once explains more than any paragraph.

A herringbone gear with a D-shaft bore · 7 steps

A gear drawn with two clicks — there is a tool that emits it for you, with its module and tooth count — extruded with 10° of twist, bored with a D for a motor shaft, chamfered on every tooth with a single revolved triangle, and mirrored into a herringbone.

And the Academy has a search box

The tutorials live in the Academy, which has a new look. It is 284 articles across six itineraries now, and that size had become a problem of its own: you had to know where to look.

Now you ask. You type "how much clearance between two parts that fit?" in your own words and it answers with the articles that cover it, so you can check for yourself. Under it is the whole library on one page: the six itineraries and their 51 sections, each with its own drawing.

What comes next

These three are the start. The idea is that every Academy article explaining how something is made — a heat-set insert boss, a living hinge, a press fit that holds — ends with a button that opens that same exercise in the editor, with the starting file loaded.

In the meantime, tell us what you would like to build: the next ones come from what you ask for. We are on Discord, at discord.gg/DSM6EcYSy — that is where tutorials get requested, questions get answered, and people show what they are printing.