The Evolution of a Stocking Holder
I have been having problems the last few Christmases hanging my family's stocking on the chimney, with care. I had some expensive hangers from a previous life, that were beautiful, but just didn't work at all. I then made some out of a couple of wire clothes hangers. Those were hideously ugly and sort of worked some of the time. But now..... I have this 3D printer.
In the course of things, my first attempt started out looking like the clothes hanger design. I made it as wide and long as would fit on my printer and used rectangle blocks joined together to look sort of like a C-clamp. I though it would hold to the mantle better with a stand, so I put a little circular one of those in also. The result was awful. Much wider than it needed to be. a little taller than it needed to be, and not nearly strong enough (and something went wrong with the print).
This started me on a multi-week trial and error of holders trying to get the topology and strength just right. My printer was doing something strange with solid rectangular boxes. They were not really printing as solids but more like some stripped things. Not very strong. I had forgotten that putting some cut-outs into shapes can make them stronger. So I went down that path for a few weeks but it just wasn't working. Then I recalled my Train Lights design and that octagons are much stronger than rectangles, so I switched over to them. That was the ticket. Except that a 7 sided shape (heptagon) worked better because it allowed me to put a flat side on the bottom and a pointed side on the top, which prints much better and easier.
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| Heptagon from Wikipedia. Flat on bottom. Pointy on top. |
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| The Heptagon with medium Fill. This is about halfway printed. The software adds the diagonal fill to trade-off between strength and plastic use. |
Now I realized that these things would be a lot prettier if they had some art on them. At first I tried to do my own art and make it integral to the hanger. But I quickly realized that it is easier to borrow Art from other thingiverse makers and to make each individual art piece separately with some easy way to attach to the hanger. And so I zeroed in on my final design.
The other day, I was looking at my work space, and I had all of these test prints laying around that showed my thought process over the last few weeks. What a lot of work. I thought it might be interesting to line them up. Sort of reminded me of the old "Evolution of Man" drawings. Except that this is the "Evolution of Hanger"
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| Evolution of Man, (See link for ownership.) |
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| Evolution of Hanger (Yeah, some are upside down) |
Anyway, after many many prints, I am at last approaching something that I can make many of and have lots of Art. Why, you can even go to Thingiverse and find the design and add your own Art!!
Now, I have to decide what I am going to do. Do I print these up just for my immediate family? Or do I extend to my Niece and Nephews and Brothers and Sisters such that I will be remembered throughout all time as the "Relative that made the Hanger"? Or do I go into business and market them and make my next Million? Must think about this some.
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| My Hanger and a borrowed Snow Flake |
Print Fail of the Week:
Speaking of being a non-perfect designer. Here is an interesting print fail that I had (twice). I failed to remember to turn on the heat on the print bed. What happened was that the raft stuck just fine to the bed, but the print came delaminated from the raft at around 50% of the print. One side of the print stuck up as the print curled and got caught on the print head. The print head then pushed the print right off of the bed and out the side of the printer. Then the printer went on happily printing a Mare's Nest in the thin air. This happened twice before I figure out what was going wrong. Interesting that it was reproducible.
