New Years Boredom

What happens on New Years' day when you have 3D printer filament, a messy cupboard containing your shaving supplies, and you are full of boredom?  You make something to hold your razors on the cupboard door, that's what.  It's a nice test of the rapid prototyping techniques and tools.  Here's the details.

First, over the last little while, I kept thinking about trying to mount the razors against the inside of the cupboard door.  It keeps them easily accessible, and leaves the rest of the shelf open for other things like shaving gels and other "keep me in a state my wife is willing to be close to me" stuff.  Yeah, this is serious stuff.  I thought about using some robe-hangers found at the local orange-box-type of store, but didn't think it would work.  (Translation: I was too lazy to go buy one of those and try it.)  New Years' morning, I woke up early (it happens a lot, even if I was up late).  It only took me an hour before I needed to do something constructive (there is only so much screen time I guy can take before his engineering kicks in, you know?).  Then it hit me - why not build my razor hangers?  I have everything I need.

I headed out to the shop and grabbed the calipers (uh, just because I might need 0.005" of accuracy), and took a few measurements of the razors in the position I'd be hanging them.  This would simply give me the basic design of the holders.

Next, I opened OpenSCAD (seriously? Yup, I grew up with POV-Ray, so I am used to using code to set up the object.  It took me an hour to get everything the way I wanted it to look.

After the design and a quick STL export, I loaded it into the printer and hit "run".

My wife and I ran and played some racquetball, then came back to a failed print.  The filament got tangled up, and prevented it from being extruded.  [sigh].  I untangled it, got it set up again (with something to keep it spooling), and hit "run" again.

We ran to see "Star Wars".  Finally saw it.  If I actually cared about my "nerd credentials", I'd have been to see it sooner, but I'm willing to wait.  Visited an "adopted" couple of boys (cute, but bouncing-off-of-the-walls kinds of energy).  Then headed and grabbed dinner, came home, and found a successful print.  I did another one (I have two razors), just for that one.  We watched another movie while we ate dinner (Disney's The Sword in the Stone), and I had two prints ready to be cleaned up and installed in less than 24 hours.

This morning, I cleaned them up (breaking support structures out of the parts), and did some sanding on them with a Dremel to remove some of the hard edges.  They turned out nice, so I grabbed some machine screws and installed them.  I know I could have used some body filler to really smooth them out and painted them, but it just wasn't worth it to me.  My wife somewhat enjoys aesthetics.  To me, it has to have a good function. We are great together, because when our heads work together, we can do some amazing work.  So, they got installed as-is, and are fully functional.

Not a bad little bit of work!