Ball and Socket Connector with Clamp Ring

thingiverse

This project has been surpassed by http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1393617. I've worked on designing a flexible gooseneck for a webcam and ended up trying to create a hollow ball and socket connector that could fulfill this purpose. My previous attempts using TPU resulted in a workable connector, but it fell apart too easily. Making the connector out of PLA resulted in a hard connector with its own problems, still falling apart too easily. This is my latest solution. I designed a ball and socket connector with grooves that allows the socket to expand just enough to insert a ball, and a retaining ring that snaps into place to keep the ball from popping back out. Once snapped into place, the retaining ring spins freely, meaning there's no stress on it that would lead to early failure. However, the ring prevents the socket from expanding enough for the ball to escape from the socket. Just snap the ring back out and it once again becomes possible to remove and reinsert the ball into the socket. The ball and socket connector is hollow, allowing you to run a cable through it. As designed, the channel through the connector is 10mm in diameter, but the parts should easily scale to meet other needs. Additional upgrade: I have threaded the inside of the top ball with 14mm x 2mm ISO Metric Trapezoidal threads for the purpose of adding components to the top. Update: This has not demonstrated the holding strength that I would like, so it may be back to the drawing board. It works well at short lengths, but as it gets longer it just can't hold enough weight to be as useful as I would like. For now, I am going to try to treat the ball joints with silicone adhesive and spread it around before it dries. That may give the joint some additional holding strength.