We have a great connection to our local library in that my mother in law is a librarian.
With that comes certain privileges and expectations. When they need cute kids for summer reading program posters, of course we help out. And when the children’s chairs get broken and need spare parts (which don’t exist) we do our best.
That brings me to today’s post: making custom replacement/repair parts. The kids area chairs, at our library, have these caps, unfortunately the caps have been worn out and walked away. Now there are these bolts that stick out on the chair corners. Clearly an issue.
The perfect solution for this issue is 3D printing our first ever custom order. (Here if you were wondering why this is under the “Etsy shop” category, it is because we are expanding to accept custom 3D printed part requests).
Luke was the mastermind behind this one. He used Google Sketch-Up to model a cap. Then with Simplify 3D, sliced it and 35 minutes later the cap was printed on our CraftBot printer!
Just like that boom, done…. well kind of. This took several trials to get the cap hole right for the screw. You want it not so small that it does not go on, but not so big that the threads don’t have anything grab on to. On the third print… it was just right.
Add a little super glue (we prefer loctite time control which gives a minute before it sets just in case the alignment was not perfect) and you are done! Now we need to add custom 3D jobs to our Etsy site(s).
That continues to be the beauty of our shops, they grow in to directions we don’t always expect.
We’ll see where this road leads but if you are reading this, and have a need for a spare part, contact us! We’ll work with you to engineer a solution.
Here is a picture of the final product. We ended up using black filament to match the feet on the chair! Turned out great.
