Ball and Socket Joint Based Helping Hands

thingiverse

I designed a ball and socket joint inspired by Thingiverse's 889439 to aid my helping hands project. I approached the design differently, incorporating a dimple and detent system that allows for numerous angles while reinforcing rigidity. The STL file versions included have a 2.5% increased ball versus socket size to maximize surface contact area and increase friction. This value works well with PETG, but you may want to experiment with lower and higher values to find what suits your needs best. The grippers should be printed with one flat side on the ball facing down and support only on the build plate. They can be tricky to remove from supports, so I recommend printing an extra one or two to avoid losing them. I experience a breakage rate of about one in ten during removal. The base can accommodate any number of sides; I opted for six to match my hex theme and minimize material usage. The render time in OpenSCAD is excessive due to the high resolution included. You may be able to reduce $fn to 26 or lower without sacrificing quality. I experimented with various dimpling patterns, but what I've created is far from optimal. However, I didn't want to invest more time perfecting them. This design utilizes the scad-utils library found on GitHub at https://github.com/openscad/scad-utils.