My daughter wanted a small windmill for a school project, and this was my very quick’n’dirty attempt.
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All posts for the month June, 2013
My daughter needed a small bridge for a school project and I couldn’t find anything suitable on-line. This was my very simple design, intended to be fully parametric, but probably only within certain limits.
Having been quoted £250 to replace the halyards and topping lift on my boat, I decided to do it myself, by purchasing the ropes from eBay for £100 and the fids to do the splicing for £33.
Having the fids would then enable me to do the rest of the running rigging: reefing pennants, kicking strap etc.
The only trouble was that I didn’t know how to splice braid-on-braid, and it turned out to be more tricky than I expected. In the end I found a YouTube video to help me.
Having bought an inflatable Avon Redcrest dinghy on eBay, I found that the pump no longer had a clip holding the two halves together. I knew that the older models used to have a piece of leather attached to one half with holes that clipped over screws on the other half, but on this pump only the screws remained.
Newer pumps instead came with a plastic clip that attached to the pump hose and clamped the two halves together and I felt that it would be quite simple to replicate and so it proved. This was a simple design exercise and worked perfectly first time. I have since re-sold the dinghy and hope that the pump clip is still serving its new owner.
Having migrated servers, my irssi tab-complete spell-check facility had broken; so I decided to document the process of getting it working.
Firstly install the required packages:
$ sudo apt-get install aspell-en libaspell-dev aspell libtext-aspell-perl
Secondly, create your user’s script folder, if not already present:
$ mkdir -p ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun
Now, download the aspell script:
$ cd ~/.irssi/scripts $ wget http://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/aspell_complete.pl $ cd autorun $ ln -s ../aspell_complete.pl
Lastly, either restart IRSSI, or, in type:
/script load ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/aspell_complete.pl
Finally got around to putting curtains up in our guest room and the curtain rings had been lost. They did eventually turn up, but these printed rings worked perfectly until we did. Yes they’re not pretty, but you really could not tell unless you got close.
My Westerly sailing boat has a rectangular-shaped shorepower socket and the faceplate was broken in half. Given its very exposed position in the cockpit, this is only to be expected, but purchasing a replacement proved very difficult. Fortunately the broken half had been kept by the previous owner, which enabled me to design an exact replica. And the beauty is that it will certainly be broken again, so I have printed a spare.
My mother-in-law’s curtains were pulled down by a Great Dane, breaking many of the curtain hooks. They seemed to be an unusual design and she asked if I might be able to print them on my RepRap.
This was very satisfying design, which did not take long, posed no particular challenges and printed very quickly. If only all jobs were like that.
A friend saw a plastic bag carrier for sale and wondered if I could produce a 3D model suitable for printing. Here was the result. A simple handle with hooks to carry multiple bags at once.
My first ever design was a shock cord toggle, but I have only now had a reason to print it and I am pleased to say that they are working perfectly. Shown here on my dinghy – used to hold the oars when not in use.