Most of the time I don’t use my 3D printer for the sort of flashy clever stuff that you usually see on youtube. Instead I regard it is a really quick way to fabricate brackets and stuff like that. If you need to quickly make a small weirdly shaped widget which won’t be subjected to too much heat or force then that’s where 3D printers excell. For making large objects they are impractical, expensive and slow.
The printer I have is a Tronxy x1 by the way, it’s a PLA printer with a 150x150x150 print volume (about 6″ cube), no heated bed, it has an impractical SD card position. While it can reportedly be used via usb, I’ve only ever used it via SD. It was very cheap and it’s fairly reliable, so for that alone I regard it as a decent printer.
Case in point – this horrible grubby cupboard was in my apartment when I moved in, it’s very bloody heavy and I use it to store camera gear.
Before anybody comments about how grubby it is, I’ve scrubbed it with all manner of tools and chemicals, the grubby bits won’t go away – I’ll get around to painting it at some stage, but that hasn’t happened yet.
As for my house being shabby – it’s a rental and it’s very cheap – finding an apartment where you can have a studio is a rare gift indeed in New Zealand.
Anyhow, the cupboard has one really annoying trait, the right hand door closes itself as you are getting stuff out, so you wind up constantly having to shove it away as you rummage, it’s also kinda heavy.
Time to fix that.
The door in question doing it thing. This is the type of annoying thing which at a rate of 3-4 very minor annoyances per week will take something like 3 years before you finally build up the motivation to actually do something about it.
Yes I have an xkcd cartoon taped to the door, this is becaue I find xkcd funny – if you do not find xkcd funny we cannot be friends.
I recently saw this spring sitting on a footpath as I was out walking, I thought to my self, ‘that sure looks like a thing that would come in handy some time’. Then I took it home with me.
I did a bit of bending on the spring and worked out where it should go. Now I need a spacer which will lock the spring to the wood and provide a path for a bolt to go through.
I use DesignSpark Mechanic for 3D design. This isn’t because I think it’s the best software, but rather becaues it’s fast and easy to use for geometrics, in this case it’s just three extruded circles with a bit of rounding applied.
It took a couple of minutes to design and maybe 5 minutes to print. Making this by any method other than 3D printing would probably take longer to do and you’d realistically need a lathe.
I use Repetier host to convert the *.OBJ file to gcode for my printer.
After the printer finishes I have a spacer which will lock the spring in place with a correctly sized bolt hole thru the middle.
The drawing in the background is an idea for a macro keypad for resizing photos in photoshop. Making images like these ones all the same size is incredibly repetitive, I should automate it more. I’ll probably order a 32u4 based microcontroller this week to experiment with to this end.
In that shot I’m working out where to place the spring for best effect before drilling.
I drilled a 6mm hole through in the right place and used a 1/4″ bolt to attach the hinge mechanism in place – the bolt (1/4″ being slightly larger than 6mm) had to be screwed into place and has no wiggle at all.
The spring may rub the wood in time, I’ll worry about that eventually (probably never), but now the door no longer presses into me when I rummage for camera gear. It also gently flicks the door open when I open it.
The world is a very slightly better place because of this.
The Society of Secretive Squirrels 