Planned Obsolescence 0 – 3D Printer 4

Yet another win against planned obsolescence, checkmate by the 3D printer. If you haven’t seen the previous parts of the series, here they are:

Planned Obsolescence, 0 – 3D Printer, 1

Broken Stuff 0 – 3D Printing 1

Planned Obsolescence, 0 – 3D Printer, 2

Planned Obsolescence 0 – 3D Printer 3

The failing device was a UV sterilizer. Its cover is held by two little plastic notches, which broke. Plastic.

Analyzing the problem

The problem is that, without that little piece of plastic, the whole thing doesn’t work. That’s because there is a little switch that is activated when the lid is closed, and that switch doesn’t get activated.

The tricky part here is that the missing plastic part is very small. It is basically 2mm thick and a few millimeters large. Besides, the hole is higher than the plastic pieces that are left. There is no way we can just put a screw directly inside the remaining plastic.

Additionally, 3D printed pieces have only a limited level of detail. And the less plastic there is, the less robust it is.

The main issue here is that we have to have something go inside this hole to hold the whole cover. There is no way a piece of plastic will handle that. It has to be a screw or bolt.

I also didn’t want to use any glue, so the holding piece should be held by another screw.

Designing the piece

I came up with a very simple design: a screw to hold the printed piece in place, and another screw that acts as a sort of hinge.

And the printed piece comes to life, notice how we are really reaching the edge of how much detail we can get:

Putting the piece in place

I first needed to drill the existing door’s plastic to fit the holding screw. Low tech drill here:

Time for truth: screwing the piece in place and testing it on the machine. In here, you can see the little switch that needs to be activated in order for the machine to work.

Final result

And the final result: a fully functional door again, and a working sterilizer.

3D printer, 4^th object fixed without needing to trash things and replace them with new ones. Yay!

Planned Obsolescence 0 – 3D Printer 3

Here is another short blog post showing the use of 3D printing against planned obsolescence… or simply the inevitable wear of objects, even when they are well designed. There was a part 1 and part 2 before this one.

The problem

In this particular case, I had a perfectly functional object… except for one little part:

As you can notice, the plastic piece that is supposed to hold the paper roll has broken. And it is not a simple fix with some glue:

Designing a solution

Fortunately, thanks to 3D printing, we can now print the same piece at home. Some 3D scanners out there can quickly scan the piece to print an exact copy. However, a broken part generally signals a weakness in the design. This is actually confirmed by the other, symmetrical, piece which started cracking in the exact some area. So printing the same piece would lead to the same problem later. Thus I redesigned it, adding some reinforcements in the area where it broke.. This way, I will reprint the piece with a stronger structure in the places where there is most tension:

Implementing the solution

And now we just need to print it:

The result looks good and quite similar to the original except it’s stronger in the weaker parts:

The main difficulty of this piece was the part that plugs into a rail on the main dispenser. The rail had to be precise enough to allow moving without being too loose.

And it is finally fixed!

Now I am waiting for the left arm to break – it will be a piece of cake to replace it.

Conclusion

Think of all the metal and plastic that could be saved if we repaired our objects instead of systematically buying new ones!

Planned Obsolescence, 0 – 3D Printer, 2

This is a follow-up to my older post Planned Obsolescence, 0 – 3D Printer, 1.

Have you ever had a problem with you vacuum cleaner where the electric cord just won’t stay out and will annoyingly get back inside the machine slowly? Like this:

Well, that happened to me. You can of course open it and try to figure out which piece is having a problem. But there’s a good chance that it won’t fix it for good and the problem will come back – that’s the whole point of programmed obsolescence.

So I designed a very simple clip to hold the wire in place, using the spring of a normal clothes peg – which by the way turned out to be very impractical as a temporary fix.

Here is the result:

Plain and simple, and downloadable on my thingiverse page, as usual.

So, here we go, Planned Obsolescence 0 – 3D Printing 2. 🙂

Planned Obsolescence, 0 – 3D Printer, 1

It is not the first time that I fix something with 3D printing. But this one was an interesting one!

The problem

A few years ago, I bought two stands for my microphones. Okay, they were inexpensive, and maybe it was a bad long-term choice. Maybe I should have opted for more expensive ones. But I have noticed that higher prices don’t always mean better quality. These days, they often mean higher reseller margins.

Anyway, both stands were poorly designed. Even though they did last several years, they finally broke recently, roughly at the same time. Unsurprisingly, the faulty piece is a part made of plastic. It sustains high pressure on a very small surface. And after a while, it just gave in. I believe that, without me noticing, cracks developed over time, until they became big enough to break the piece completely:

As you can see, it is pretty bad. Of course, I couldn’t find spare pieces, especially as these are already “old” (anything beyond a year is “old” nowadays). And without this piece, the stands are totally unusable.

Reflexes…

The first reflex was: it’s cheap stuff, I can buy new stands! Why bother for 20 euros?

But apart from this broken piece, those stands are in perfect condition and they could serve their purpose for many more years. Why pay? Why extract more metals from the Earth, build more plastic pieces mostly from petroleum, more rubber from trees or worse from petroleom again, use energy to forge, heat, assemble, then use again more energy to ship those new stands to me or go and fetch them from a local store – where they would have been shipped from somewhere anyway? And dispose from transport boxes that kill trees? As well of course as disposing from the broken stands. And as a result buy new stands in a few years when those new ones will break?

I didn’t actually want any of that, especially as I have the “Planned Obsolescence Killer” at home : a 3D printer!

Compared to all the waste of buying brand new stands, printing a piece is quite environment-friendly: it does use some electricity (not much), and I mainly print using PLA, which is basically made of… corn. This material does have its pros and cons, but it is certainly better than petroleum-based plastic.

Designing a solution

I spent some time designing a solution. This piece allows the axis to be rotated to the desired angle, and it is a functionality that is really needed for this kind of object! So even though there were many alternative ways of fixing that stand, I wanted to stick with the original design as much as possible.

On the other hand, printing this kind of piece with PLA was going to get me in the exact same trouble in a few years: the plastic would certainly not resist the pressure. I could also print with nylon, but I try to avoid it as much as possible due to environmental concerns. Besides, given the pressure on that piece, I wouldn’t be so sure that even nylon would resist for a long time.

I first thought of adding washers to maximize the surface in contact, but I finally came up with using nuts with a ring base.

3D modelling and printing

Here is one part of the final model:

I heated the printer and printed the pieces:

Results

That piece has two other pieces which hold the nuts in place and stop them from turning, even if the pressure actually isn’t a rotating one but a pulling one.

Mounting the nuts in place and putting one of the pieces in its socket:

The socket for the second piece is clearly visible. The final mounted piece:

And now it was just a matter of putting it instead of the old piece:

Et voilà ! Both stands are fixed with just a few grams of PLA. I think they will last some more years. In fact, I believe this kind of thing should last at least for a lifetime. But then, how would we sustain “economic growth” to pay for growing banking interests?