A while ago we bought rechargeable light bars for our pantry shelves, and we love them. The only problem was that because they were held to the underside of the shelf by weak magnets, every time we bumped a light or dropped a heavy jar into the pantry, the light would clatter to the floor.
This post covers my process of creating, in FreeCAD, clips that would hold the lights securely. I’m really pleased at how they turned out.
Continue reading A FreeCAD Case Study: Designing a Light Bar Clip
One of the things holding me back from 3D printing for so long was learning what tools I needed and how to use them. It’s relatively easy to print things once you have a design: Cults3D, Hubs, and many others (including your friends who have printers) can print your designs, your local library may have printers for you to use, or you can buy a printer for a few hundred dollars.
Continue reading Getting Started With 3D PrintingIn converting a desk into a clockmaker’s bench, I wound up buying a router and router table to make the drawers. The router table has been taking up space on my workbench ever since.
I decided to make a rolling cabinet to mount the router table to, using scrap plywood and some drawers left over from a bathroom remodel. The project is a good example of a thrown-together wood project, and a few lessons in “measure twice; cut once”.
Continue reading Building a Quick Router Table CabinetIf you’re interested in Gothic architecture, you may have seen my post on Designing a Gothic Trefoil. In this post I walk you though the design in FreeCAD of a simpler ornament, the Gothic Duefoil: a circle divided into two arches, which are themselves each divided into three lobes.
Continue reading Designing a Gothic Duefoil in FreeCADI’ve been interested in the Tracery in Gothic Cathedrals – the delicate patterns in stone walls and windows – for years. In this post, I show you how to design of one type of Gothic ornament, using FreeCAD. You can follow along with the FreeCAD file on Cults3D, or you can use your favorite CAD application, such as Autodesk Fusion 360.
Last month at the Portland OR 3D printing Meetup, someone suggested we should all make our own name badges so Shashi wouldn’t need to bring as many “Hello, My Name Is” paper tags to the Meetups. Game On!
In this post I explain how to make your own, two-color 3D Printed name badge just like mine.
I’ve found 3D printing to be perfect for creating replacement parts for the various things that break around the house. Recently I realized that I could make a replacement for the armoire door clip that had been bent beyond recognition over the years. This post details how I designed and tested the 3D printed replacement, including a checklist at the end of this post.
Continue reading Designing a 3D printed cabinet clip replacement
In my previous post I soldered the weight scale parts to a proto-board. In this post, I design and 3D-print the part that keeps the Load Sensors from slipping.
The Load Sensor is an oddly-shaped thing that has a few tricky constraints: the T-shaped part in the middle must be free to bend downward (my wooden mounts take care of that), and I don’t want it to slide out of place horizontally or tilt off of its position when I’m putting the top plywood piece on the scale.
Continue reading Dog Weight Scale Part 10: 3D Printing Load Sensor Holders
