Bolts with Blender tutorial

This is a new Blender tutorial in which I show you how to create simple bolts to add details to your hard surfaces.

Creating a simple bolt is really easy: Start by deleting the default cube from your scene, then add a circle mesh:

Add a new circle

and limitcount of the vertices to 6:

limit vertices of circle

Select the object in Edit Mode, select all (A key) and then press E key and then Z to extrude in Z direction:

select edge loop

After extruding fill the upper face by pressing the F key:

Close face

Then switch to vertex mode and select two vertices from each side of the object to join:

Next step is to add 2 edge loops by pressing Ctrl + R key:

Add some loop cuts

Then select the outer faces:

Select faces of bolt

Press the E key and then Z key to extrude them:

Extrude bolt to z axis

Now the object looks like the head of a bolt. To enhance it select the outer edges with edge selection enabled and press Ctrl + B key for beveling. Use the mouse wheel and move the mouse to define the amount of beveling:

bevel for bolt

The screw looks really nice now. You can use it for adding details e.g. to a hard metal surface. To do this add the snapping for faces:

Snapping for faces

If you have an object with a hard surface like then one below, you can move the screw after pressing G key to the desired place snapping to the surface of your object:

Duplicate and add bolt head to face

Duplicate the screw with Shift – D key and add it were it looks cool:

Added bolts to hard surface

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial. If you wish to create bolts with diffenrent shapes, heads and bits you can also try the Bolts Addon which is shipped with Blender, but we will add a tutorial for this one, too.