Thumb brace

thingiverse

I've got a stress injury to my thumb, courtesy of a workout gone horribly wrong. The commercial braces just weren't cutting it for me, especially since I'm always hitting the open waters to swim or paddle. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and design one myself. First things first, I 3D scanned my hand to get an accurate model. From there, I worked on smoothing out the design and adding a cool Voronoi pattern to give it some visual interest. My goal was to create a closed brace that would fit like a glove, using TPU elastic filament to provide a comfortable and flexible fit. I've given it a test run and I'm wearing it right now (you can see the photo), but let's be real - it's not exactly the most effective thumb brace. The problem is that TPU just doesn't have enough give to make it easy to slip on or off, especially when you're dealing with an injury. I've found that I can barely get my fingers into it, and if you've got a throbbing pain in your thumb, you don't want to be forcing anything. Just keep in mind that this design is tailored to my hand size - I measured the width of my wrist (52mm) and scaled up the internal hole by about 5mm to get a comfortable fit. My right printing scale was spot on, thanks to some careful planning. That being said, it's still a solid starting point, and I'm eager to get back to work on improving it if I've got the time.