Recently I have been glueing a load of kensington lock plates on to stuff so that folks don’t wander off with them. Admittedly these aren’t going to stop folks actually stealing them but it stops casual theft and ups the level of mental criminality. These little things are expensive and turn out to be rather difficult to find to purchase in the UK. So what to do? Yep you guessed it print my own. So fire up the 3D modelling software which we just seem to have about and make a model.

There is no real world measurement in the software so the first prototype is a bit on the big size.

What I made next to what I was after. Obviously way to big. It also occurred to me that the ends were round for a reason, ie corners are easy places to get leverage to ping it off.

An here are the final results. In the first the hole is a little to big and not deep enough. The second is pretty close and needs a tiny adjustment and its ready to go.

And here a few printed at different fill densities stuck to the side of a cupboard for testing.

So having thought about the problem I reckoned that the gear on the stepper motor was probably the problem as the belt seemed tight enough. Popped it off and it did look a bit ill defined. So what to do? Print out another gear off course 🙂

Then have another crack at the print.

And we have a winner!

Here is the original scan

Yep. seems like I have a problem with the beds Y axis slipping during printing. I am not sure if its the poor plastic gear or the belt slipping but it only does it in one direction which makes me think belt slippage.

Here is todays print which I would have been happy with if it hadn’t slipped half way down her face.