I’m still hacking away at stuff for a variety of reasons — to satisfy my curiosity, to learn stuff useful in my career, to turn my small business into something awesome, to keep me sane. This month, I did a few things that I released to the world under the Creative Commons, but I also did some stuff that I am playing close to the vest. All in all, I’d call it a pretty fantastic month, really. Curious?
Software Stuff
I started down the wrong road for a bit. I’ve got some ideas for a series of WordPress plugins — I was chasing the most interesting one first, but then came to the realization that they could work in-tandem with each other. But I’d have to start building from a different angle if I was going to do this in a way that was meaningful. So I’m on that now, and I think that what I’m building will make for interesting/compelling stuff.
3D Printing
Some fun stuff went down here. One of my simple pieces was a GoPro Wrench, pictured below. It’s to solve the crappy grip issues on the little knobs that come with a GoPro, which are particularly lame if your hands are wet or cold.
It’s a remix of a couple of pieces I found on Thingiverse, and I’ve posted it there for those of you with access to 3D printers.
For those of you that don’t have access to a printer and want one of these gems, I have two of the orange (final design) and the dark grey prototype to give away. If you want one, comment below, and use your real email address when you fill out the form. I’ll reach out to you. First two “WANT” comments get the orange (final) wrenches. Third comment gets the grey prototype.
The SPD-SL pedal shim I was working on last month came to completion, and I promptly discovered it had way too much curve in it. It was a great proof-of-concept. I’m thinking my next approach is to find a way to render this sucker as an OpenSCAD object and to make it something that can be modified with the Customizer on Thingiverse. That’s not super-high priority at the moment, though.
I also printed a large-scale version of the T. Rex offered on Thingiverse. I went 1.75x because at 2x, parts wouldn’t fit in the UPrint SE. Adding up all the print time comes out to about 150 hours. That was spread across three printers, printing at 0.01″ layer resolution and solid infill. I need to sit down and take the time to assemble it.
Back on the bike side of things, there’s the project I’ve undertaken for my buddy Alex — he’s the brains behind A-Train Cycles. He needed a screw-on cable guide for a 2″ bottom bracket shell. A pretty simple thing that doesn’t exist, apparently, so I’ve slapped together a simple design, and have a test run in the print queue. If all goes well, I’m going to crank out a batch of them in Nylon 6.
Bike Hacks
One of the fun things from this last month was realizing that I could create a lot of bicycle tools using CAD, 3D printing, and 8020 extrusion. So I started to. My first piece is a open source wheel truing stand. I’ve got plans coming together and I’m doing a test build to confirm that it works as well as I’m hoping. Should everything pan out with that, I’ll be making the files readily available to anyone that wants to download them, under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International). Should everything go smoothly with that, there’s a few other things I want to tinker with:
- Bike rack fittings — build a hitch mounted rack or roof rack for your car, using 8020 extrusion.
- A frame fixture — likely not good for anything involving a torch, but good for anyone building out of carbon or bamboo.
- A wheel dishing tool would be pretty sweet, but I don’t know if I have anything with a print volume to manage it.