Luggage Fix

thingiverse

We were packing to leave town the next day and two of our suitcases had handles that wouldn't budge anymore. We opened them up to see what was wrong and discovered that during previous trips, the tubes for the handles had been bent, causing the handles to malfunction. I used a Dremel tool to carefully cut out a 1-inch section of the bent tubing, then printed a new tube that was 2cm thick to replace it. I simply slid the new tube in and secured it with duct tape. After flying from MI to FL and cutting open the tape, we found out that our fix had held up perfectly. We might still end up buying new luggage, but it was reassuring to know that this problem could be solved in a pinch. Print Settings: Printer Brand: Printrbot Printer: Simple Black Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: Low Infill: 15% Notes: If I were doing it again, I'd scale up the print by a bit. We only had about 1cm extra on each side of the section we cut out. Maybe I would have made it a little tighter too, but as I said before, our fix survived the trip with just a slight wobble when attached.