After a few decades including three kids, our couch was falling apart, so we bought a new set. But the plastic feet slid around on our wood floor and were clearly going to do damage. And every time someone sat down, they would slide a little.
Instead of buying some expensive solution to this problem at the hardware store, I broke out FreeCAD and NinjaFlex. I printed out simple caps that just barely fit over the feet, and now the couches stay put,even when someone emphatically, theatrically flops down on the couch.
The FreeCAD files here are nothing special, just one way to model this.
As this photograph shows, if these weren’t hidden under couches I could really stand to improve my NinjaFlex profile. This is after cutting off a bunch of blobs with side cutters. But hey they work!
After spending literally man days worth of hours tuning slicers/printers I just can’t look at a 3D printed object and observe the quality and those look darn good IMO. And those soft filaments do require more time tuning retraction to lower the stringing and blobbing.
I see you went with pretty thin walls and no fillet at the bottom/wall intersection. If the walls do get torn off from the bottom, I’ve been impressed with how much fillets help in that regard. But being flexible might be enough in this implementation. Love the sapphire blue color!
I’m definitely going to have to use that crush ribs idea. I’ve used them for PETG but hadn’t thought of them for TPU for some reason.
I also remember you posting about making car jack point cushion blocks out of TPU, and that was one of the things that made me realize that it was tougher than my intuition gave it credit for.
(Also, I’ve really enjoyed following your Arrakis posts on your blog.)
Thanks! Arrakis has moved from being a project to being a tool to display the patterns. I usually create at least a couple new ones per week when I’m watching TV or listening to music.
I have a new, very fast TPU project. It’s a handle for Ikea blue bags. I keep a couple of those bags in my car to haul groceries up to my condo. The bag have cloth handles that hurt my hands when the bag is loaded, so I made a TPU handle.
It should work well for similar bags and dog leashes.
I printed with a 1 mm nozzle in 0.5 mm layers. The layer ridges make it easy to grip the handle without it slipping, and the TPU has just enough give to be comfortable in the hand even when the bag is heavy.
Emily Velasco, @MLE_online on twitter, has been printing functional o-rings/o-belts out of TPU for a while, which I think is really cool. I didn’t think of doing feet for chairs with it, but am going to try that.
