clockspring3D

Bigger and Clamp-ier!

Added 2020-01-17 11:15:21 +0000 UTC

I started out intending to design a carabiner, and ended up with a C-clamp. It's the oldest tale, right? I was working with ovals, rectangles, hinges and screw closures, and suddenly realised I was basically half-way to a clamp.

Why another print-in-place clamp, though, when I'd made that other print-in-place clamp? Well, apart from the fact that this was a completely different style, which has its own appeal from a design point of view, this one can be printed much larger.

Here's a sketch!

Hey look, I even wrote 2020 on there. I almost forgot it was 2020 already...

So, you probably get the idea from the pictures: The body is an industrial-looking C shape and the stylish T-shaped threaded handle prints through it. The good thing about a screw connection is that it's much more tolerant of scaling than, say, a hinge. The model here was printed at 200% and works just fine.

The threads needed a bit of tweaking so that they'd print okay at 45 degrees, but generally speaking all the angles involved are pretty reasonable.

So, compromises? Print-in-place means we're bound to have some, and the one I can think of here is that the C-shaped body would ideally be printed lying down to optimise strength in the print. That said, you'd need to be cranking down the clamp extremely hard before layers would separate, and you might well tear the handle apart trying to achieve that...