Dumb designs

[niget2002 (David Walling)]

I’m working on a wall mount for a floorstanding vertical fan.

The designers of the fan have a removable stand on the bottom. Great! I can use that to mount one end of my mount.

Sure.

9 iterations later, I think I finally have the holes lining up. None of these holes are directly across from each other or even at the same distance from ‘center’ of the device.

Oh. And the base isn’t an actual circle.

What I ended up doing is making a circle template large enough to go around all the holes. Then use offsets from the outside edge to get a starting point for each hole. Lastly I picked one hole as the reference point and measured the distance from it to the other holes to move them around their circle to the correct location.

The first 3 holes lined up perfect first try. The last two holes took maximum effort

Why did they design it this way?

I have the same issue with pcb designers that stick mounting holes at random distances from edges. At least a few companies are providing decent mounting diagrams now.

Here’s my pile of test pieces.

[Fabien]

This is where a flatbed scanner helps

[Tokoloshe (Philipp)]

That’s what I wanted to say.

[niget2002 (David Walling)]

I have one. Fan is too tall to fit on top of scanner without hitting ceiling and too lazy to put scanner on the ground.

A 3d scanner would have been nice.

I did finally get the test piece to fit.

[Fabien]

On these instances I just trace the outline and features on paper and scan the paper
Also solves parralax problems

[niget2002 (David Walling)]

where were you 8 hours ago when I was still struggling with this

[Fabien]

haha! I went down this rabbit hole way too many times
You live you learn ^^

Let’s say it’s still an interesting lesson about how to get references/measurments out of a “kinda round” shape, which might also come in handy at some time

[Fabien]

Also, quick tip for those prototypes: print with 0 top/bottom layers, only infill…
It’s way quicker, and uses less filament

I already mentioned it on another thread I think, but it’s always a good reminder…

[niget2002 (David Walling)]

Good idea. I did 1mm test prints. Most tests took 5-10 minutes to print.

I finished the parts. I need to adjust the one on the left to add more support.

[bitingmidge (Peter H)]

Just as an aside, here are a couple of posts on the topic of straightening photos - just including them now after fact in case someone finds them and can use them.

DIY Digitizing Machine

I am missing something here I think. If the panels are always flat, it’s a very simple thing to trace in your cad software very accurately and very quickly without the need for any fancy stuff. Of course you need to have a reasonably accurate photograph. An iphone has all the tools built in so I presume an Android would have similar. At the risk of telling you how to suck eggs, but this might be helpful to someone else. I do exactly this: I place the object on an accurately gridded surfa…

Tracing shapes with a CNC, an idiot's tale

I’m not sure if I’m missing something here, and I assume there’s a similar function in an Android Phone - I regularly “scan” odd shapes using my iPhone - I usually use photoshop to transform to the original shape, but you can use the crop feature in the phone to do a fairly good job. Place the object on a square grid so that you have a reference. Turn on “grid” on your phone and line it up as best you can with the square grid background. The phone has a pair of cross hairs (see the yellow a…