Vibration absorber with hotglue sticks, fully customizable, with extras.

thingiverse

After a few days of testing the first design as a vibration absorber for my printer (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2938203), I was pleased with the result. The small vibrations and vertical shocks are gone at the bottom of the feet, but it's not very well designed for horizontal shocks. I looked for another cheap and simple solution and thought about using glue sticks for my glue gun. These are flexible and strong enough to carry weight, and they can handle the horizontal shocks and twisting, but less with vertical shocks. Of course, you can use a different material as long as it's round. The design is completely customizable to your own wishes. You can customize it in Thingiverse Customizer or in OpenScad. The longer the pieces of glue stick the more flexible the result will be. The height of the fitting/holder for the sticks also affects this, and of course so does the number of rods. I use 5 rods with a length of 3 cm, but probably 4 rods with a length of 4 or maybe 5 cm would be better. Nevertheless, it works reasonably well already. Making the feet anti-slip by using hot glue or a piece of an inner-tire and gluing them together should improve the result further. Update: 4 rods of 5 cm glued in place and with anti-slip work really well. It looks a little stupid though, so I'll try 4 cm later. See video (if it will upload), the foot is partly hidden by my prototype for the housing. Print quality is good, and I'll try a benchy and ghosting test later. The diameter of the sticks is 7.2 mm, but sticks with a diameter of 11 mm can also be used - they're almost three times as stiff in theory. 7 mm glue-sticks are fairly cheap, and I bought them for one euro or dollar for a package of ten at my local dollar store (actually an euro store). They come in different colors, and if you feel a little tacky even in metallic. This design can be mounted directly on the frame of your printer or something else (if it's not moving use the other design). I am currently working on a housing for both designs. If you wanna use this housing for this thing, set the inner diameter for both parts as large as the outer diameter - the code will correct this to the maximum possible inner diameter. Calculating the height of the absorber is easy: Height = Height of the rods + 2 * thick material holder. The OpenScad file can also serve for other things - see the pictures for some good and bad ideas. More information about the fantastic and challenging program OpenScad can be found here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual Happy absorbing and customizing!