Repairs You Can Print

23 Articles

Repairs You Can Print: Floor Lamp Is Now Several Shades Better

February 12, 2018 by 8 Comments

We all have that one possession—maybe more than one—that we’ve had forever and refuse to let go of, even though it has seen better days. When that something is a useful appliance, it can be heartbreaking to watch it deteriorate. For [Elmojo], that thing is a 10+ year old Medusa-style floor lamp. It still looks and works great, but the plastic shades are crumbling. The good news: [Elmojo] has a 3D printer.

Here’s where things get exciting. Not only did [Elmojo] have a pretty good chance of making new shades that would work, he had a chance to change the design, and he did. He could have made ’em look like those twisted or low-poly vases that everybody loves to print. And he still could do that. See, that’s one of the best things about 3D printers. Not only can you rejuvenate beloved objects, you can do it your way. Experiment. You could print out a whole collection and change the shades once a week. Different shapes, different colors. Glow-in-the-dark shades!

[Elmojo] printed the new shades with white BAMTack! (emphasis theirs), and they have been going strong for a while now. The two on the left are the original shades, and the three on the right were printed.

There’s still plenty of time to enter our Repairs You Can Print contest, which runs until high noon Pacific time on February 20th. Don’t forget—we’re giving away TWO Prusa i3 Mk3s plus the multi-material upgrade—one to the best student entry and the other to the best entry from an organization. Isn’t there something you’ve been meaning to fix?

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Hackaday Links: February 11, 2018

February 11, 2018 by 20 Comments

Are you a student? Are you part of a hackerspace? We have a contest going on right now where you can win a fancy new Prusa i3 MK3. The Repairs You Can Print contest is a challenge to do something useful with that machine that spits out tugboats. We’re looking for functional repairs of items around your house, office, or garage. Did you repair something with a 3D printer? Then you too can get in on the action! Enter now! Check out the entries!

You may know Flite Test as the group who do everything surrounding remote control flight (mostly fixed wings, a nice counter to the quadification of the hobby over the last few years). Flite Test designs and sells airplanes made out of Dollar Tree foam board, they have yearly, bi-coastal meetups, and they’re all-around awesome dudes. Now, they want to build the Disneyland of RC flight. [Josh Bixler], the face of Flite Test and a guy who has a plane named after him, wants to buy a golf course and turn it into the world’s best RC flying park, with a ~2000 foot grass strip for general aviation. We’re looking at their crowdfunding campaign, and it looks promising it might be funded by the time this goes live.

A while ago, [Peter Jansen], the guy who built a tricorder and a laser-cut CT scanner, made a magnetic camera. This Hall Effect camera is a camera for magnetism instead of light. Now, this camera has been fully built and vastly improved. He’s capturing ‘frames’ of magnetism in a spinning fan at 2000 Hz (or FPS, terminology kind of breaks down here), and it’s beautiful.

Oh thank God we can finally buy GPUs again. Try buying them with Bitcoin.

In the last few years, CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, has expanded. Originally, this was one of the treaties that banned the import or export of rhino horn, but recently this expanded to the export of rosewood thanks to increased demand in China for rosewood furniture. The laws of unintended consequences kicked into effect, and importing anything made out of rosewood is now a mess of permits and inspections at the border, including musical instruments. Travelling orchestras, for example, are at risk of having their string section confiscated because of rosewood tuning pegs. Cooler minds may now be prevailing, and there’s some hope the regulations may be changed during the next meeting of the CITES convention next year.

As noted a few months ago, there was a possibility of Broadcom buying Qualcomm for one… hundred… Billion dollars. This offer was rejected, with Qualcomm saying the offer wasn’t high enough. Broadcom fired back with an offer of $82 per share, or $121B. This offer was rejected this week.

Need some EMC testing? [Zach]’s got your back. He’s reserved some time in a 10m EMC chamber for testing NeuroBytes this week. If you have an Open Source project that needs a pre-test scan for unintentional radiator, you can get in on the action. This is just a pre-test, you’re not getting certification, and you’re not going to test anything with radios, and you need to ship [Zach] your stuff. But still, free test time. Woo.

Repairs You Can Print: Fixing A Rat-Attacked Mic Cord

February 5, 2018 by 23 Comments

We’ve all been there — a steamy night in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea, sweaty slumber disturbed by the unmistakable sounds of gnawing. In the morning we discover that a rodent of unusual tastes has chewed the microphone cable of our transceiver right half in two, leaving us out of touch with base camp. If we had a nickel for every time that’s happened.

It may sound improbable, but that’s the backstory behind [Marius Taciuc]’s 3D-printed mic cord repair. Even with more mundane failure modes, the retractile cords on microphones are notoriously difficult to fix. Pretty much any of the usual suspects, like heat-shrink tubing or electrical tape, are going to do very little to restore the mechanical stability lost once that tough outer jacket is breached. [Marius]’s solution was to print as small an enclosure as possible to mechanically support the splice. The fit is tight, but there was just enough room to solder the wires and stuff everything back in place. Cable ties provide strain relief where the cord exits the splice, and a liberal squirt of hot glue pots the joint. It’s not perfect — we’ll bet the splice acts as a catch point and gets a little annoying after a while — but if it gets you back on the air fast and cheap, it probably makes sense.

[Marius] entered this rat-race beating hack into the Repairs You Can Print contest. Do you have an epic repair that was made possible by a 3D printer? Let the world know about it and you might just win a prize.

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Repairs You Can Print: A Little Love For The Glove Box

February 5, 2018 by 25 Comments

A few years ago, [Brieuc]’s car blew a fuse. He went to replace it, which unfortunately means removing the entire glove box. In his haste to get his baby back on the road, he accidentally broke one of the clips that holds the glove box on the dashboard.

[Brieuc] tried to just glue the thing back together, but it didn’t hold because the part has to flex a little bit for people who need to get into the fuse box. No one seems to offer a replacement for this small but vital hunk of plastic, though he did find someone offering total glove box replacements at highway robbery prices. Since there was still one good clip, he used it to design and print a strong ABS replacement.

This is a great example of the one-off utility of 3D printers. [Brieuc] didn’t need an exact copy, and since he was replacing an injection-molded part with additive manufacturing, he had the freedom to start with a bare-bones design, make adjustments as needed, and iterate until he got it right. It didn’t take long. The layer orientation of the first print made the legs too weak, but that’s a simple fix. The second version has lasted for three years and counting.

We get it. You don’t have the same car as [Brieuc], so this particular fix doesn’t sway you. But someday in the future when your zipper breaks or your dishwasher detergent cup won’t latch, 3D printing will be there to help.

Repairing A Wounded Mantis

February 5, 2018 by 20 Comments

While it’s true that we didn’t specifically say making Hackaday staff exceedingly jealous of your good fortune would deduct points from your entry into our ongoing “Repairs You Can Print Contest”, we feel like [Sam Perry] really should have known better. During a recent dumpster dive he found an older, slightly damaged, but still ridiculously awesome Mantis stereo inspection microscope. Seriously, who’s throwing stuff like this away?

Rendered replacement mount in Fusion 360

Apparently, the microscope itself worked fine, and beyond some scratches and dings that accumulated over the years, the only serious issue was a completely shattered mount. Luckily he still had the pieces and could get a pretty good idea of what it was supposed to look like. After what we imagine was not an insignificant amount of time in Fusion 360, he was able to model and then print a replacement.

The replacement part was printed on a Tronxy P802M in PLA. Even at 0.3mm layer height, it still took over 10 hours to print such a large and complex component. A few standard nuts and bolts later, and he had a drop-in replacement for the original mount.

Whether it’s due to how big and heavy the Mantis is, or a slight miscalculation in his model, [Sam] does mention that the scope doesn’t sit perfectly level; he estimates it’s off by about 5 degrees.

We’re somewhat suspicious that mentioning an error of only 5 degrees is a stealth-brag on the same level as telling everyone you found a Mantis in the trash. But if [Sam] gives us the GPS coordinates of the dumpster in which people are throwing away high-end lab equipment, all will be forgiven.

There’s still plenty of time to get your entry into the “Repairs You Can Print” contest! The top twenty projects will receive $100 in Tindie store credit, and the top entries in the Student and Organization categories will each receive a Prusa i3 MK3 with the Quad Material upgrade kit: arguably one of the best 3D printers currently on the market. If you were considering going back to school, or finally leaving your basement and joining a hackerspace, now would definitely be the time.

Repairs You Can Print: Nintendo 3DS XL Lives Again!

February 4, 2018 by 18 Comments

Handheld game consoles have a hard life, and even the most well-built models can sometimes fail. The Nintendo 3DS XL, for example, can fail at its hinge, which is what happened to the one owned by [Mark]. Would he fix the hinge? No, he had a far simpler if a little less flexible solution, a 3D-printed bracket that clips over the whole device.

Sometimes the best pieces of work are also the simplest ones, and this one certainly fits that bill on both counts. When your console dies, you want it fixed, and though this doesn’t extend as far as providing a working hinge action it should allow you to play without further damaging anything. It’s not impossible to imagine that it could be made to incorporate a flexible zig-zag section to produce a closeable hinge, but if your Nintendo is broken you’ll care little for such niceties. The project can be downloaded from its Thingiverse page.

A common failure that we’d expect to accompany a broken hinge would be a faulty flexible ribbon cable. Fortunately, those are fixable on the 3DS, too.

Repairs You Can Print: 3D Printing Is For (Solder) Suckers

February 2, 2018 by 17 Comments

[Joey] was about to desolder something when the unthinkable happened: his iconic blue anodized aluminium desoldering pump was nowhere to be found. Months before, having burned himself on copper braid, he’d sworn off the stuff and sold it all for scrap. He scratched uselessly at a solder joint with a fingernail and thought to himself: if only I’d used the scrap proceeds to buy a backup desoldering pump.

Determined to desolder by any means necessary, [Joey] dove into his junk bin and emerged carrying an old pump with a broken button. He’d heard all about our Repairs You Can Print contest and got to work designing a replacement in two parts. The new button goes all the way through the pump and is held in check with a rubber band, which sits in a groove on the back side. The second piece is a collar with a pair of ears that fits around the tube and anchors the button and the rubber band. It’s working well so far, and you can see it suck in real-time after the break.

We’re not sure what will happen when the rubber band fails. If [Joey] doesn’t have another, maybe he can print a new one out of Ninjaflex, or build his own desoldering station. Or maybe he’ll turn to the fire and tweezers method.

Continue reading “Repairs You Can Print: 3D Printing Is For (Solder) Suckers” →