Repairs around the apartment

No major developments on the printer this time, but the printer has been useful for a couple of repairs around the apartment. Don't ever get a 3D printer just for repair purposes, but if you happen to have one of them, it can be very handy.

The support of a part of the window shutters broke; it took 2 iterations, but now there is a piece which is as good as the old one.

A glass shower cabin system turned out to be a bit flimsy. It has one support bar consisting of 2 aluminium tubes which should fit with a plastic ring (grey in the picture). Since the ring was a bit too thin, the inner tube could move inside the outer tube too much. Two additional plastic rings were printed to make the tubes fit perfectly and make the system much stronger than the original. You can see the ring on the right needed some sanding to get it to fit. The ring on the left was printed later with a slightly smaller outside radius as learned from the first ring. The picture was taken when the rings where almost ready to go inside the outer tube where they won't be visible anymore.

New shelves in the kitchen cupboard above the sink turned out to be more than one centimeter wider than the old ones, making the support pieces useless since they required small nails to be driven into the wood too close to the edge. Designing new support pieces did not take long and printing four pieces at a time produced  new supports in about an hour. The pieces are screwed at an angle of about 45 degrees to make screws accessible with a screw driver, but keep the head of the screw completely inside the plastic in a neat way. You can see that this is printed with the new wade type extruder which is still not controlled by the printer software, meaning that there are way more plastic strings between the 4 pieces than necessary which needed some sanding; fixing this is on the to-do list... The final result is nice; it could have been printed in white ABS easily, but using green PLA makes the cupboard more interesting! A total of 20 pieces were printed for 5 shelves.

Finally some small pieces of the printer which where printed a while back already. The power supply unit is mounted on the base of the printer, which is is a piece of wood. A metal strap around it will keep it from falling off, but it won't keep it from moving. Four plastic corner blocks where printed which keep the power supply a bit above the base and prevent it from shifting.

Next time more development work on the printer.