First make of the year

The first make of the year was a bit of 3D printing. I am road testing a Bitscope Blade over on Element14 and wanted to mount my disk and power supply on a board.

Design

After failing to find anything suitable on Thingiverse I fired up OpenSCAD and designed a couple of brackets. To strengthen the brackets I added a fillet to the corner. I also added a countersink to the holes using a simple cone. The holes for the disk drive screw were counter bored as the screws were not very long. My initial designs were 25mm across and 5mm thick. I quickly realised this was overkill so shrank them down to 10mm with a 3mm thickness.

3D Models on Github

Printing

I printed the brackets on their sides. This means that the uprights are less likely to sheer off as the layers do not align with the places where cracks are most likely to form. The diagram below shows the approximate path of the print head when printing flat vs upright.

I used ABS for these brackets as I only have a small amount of PLA. If doing this with PLA perhaps I might have kept the larger dimensions.

The brackets were screwed to the board with small self tapping screws as I did not have any small woodscrews.

One thought on “First make of the year

  1. ted k says:

    Great post.

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