Stepping up to the mark

My wife is a very measured person. As well as watching how much power we using she likes to count her footsteps with a pedometer to check if she is getting here daily quota of 10,000. I have bought her several pedometers but they generally come to an early demise due ti inadequate belt clips. The last one fell into the toilet! The first one I bought was the best, but the belt clip broke off.



I promised to RepRap a new clip a long time ago, but only got round to it today. Neither of us could remember what the old clip looked like so I designed a simple one from scratch. To my surprise it printed perfectly on the hot bed, I thought it might need some cooling. HydraRaptor will have automatically dropped to half speed because the layers are so small.



I cut off the remains of the old clip and filed it smooth. I then removed all traces of grease with some isopropanol and welded it on with some MEK pipe cement. A friend gave me it anticipating that I might want to weld ABS someday. It will dissolve and weld ABS and PVC. I think the case is ABS, so it is ideal for the job. It needs 4 hours to cure, so I left it overnight.

It seems to have done the job. I offered to make it in black but my wife wasn't bothered.



The next problem was that the batteries had gone flat in the years she has been waiting for me to fix it. Buying specific batteries is expensive but you can get a mixed selection of 40 for £1. The problem is though that we mainly use the biggest ones so have too many of the smaller ones. I had some that were the right diameter but too thin so I Reprapped some spacers.



I can now make objects side by side one layer at a time with no strings between them. These are probably the smallest things I have made. They are about the size of tiddlywinks.



A bit tricky to keep in place while the battery cover is replaced but they did the job.



So I am back in the good books for a while. I managed to run off two of these as well. They take about 90 minutes each and are perfectly flat and string-less again.



Just the odd lump on the surface at the start or end of an outline. I think that can be easily solved by always starting on an inner shell before doing the outer shell and then finishing the outer shell with a wipe towards the inner one.