1/2" PVC Holiday Light Hooks

thingiverse

Every Christmas season I have been setting up a lighted tunnel over the sidewalk in front of our house. It is essentially 1/2" PVC tubing that is connected together to provide a skeleton structure to hang the lights from (see uploaded pictures for context). The neighborhood kids love it since it is a Christmas decoration they can "interact" with by walking through it. This year when I was hanging the lights, I used over 100 zip ties to secure the lights to the pvc tubing. I felt this was rather wasteful since I would not be able to reuse them, and everything else about the setup is reusable year-to-year. And when hanging lights from our house we have reusable plastic hooks that connect to our gutters and secure the light strands. So, I decided to design my own hooks that would be compatible with the 1/2" PVC tubing. It took me a little time and prototyping, but I have something that seems to work pretty well. Next year I am going to print my hooks in white or natural PLA or HIPS and use them to hang all the lights on the PVC structure. There are two files: half_inch_pvc_hook_small.stl - This is a hook that attaches to the 1/2" PVC tubing and has a space to hold a single strand of lighting wire (~8 mm circular area). It just snaps onto the tubing over the lighting wire. half_inch_pvc_hook_large.stl - This is the same as the small one (still fits the 1/2" PVC tubing) but it has a larger space to hold two strands of lighting wire (~10 mm of circular area). Print Settings Printer Brand: LulzBot Printer: Mini Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: Standard Notes: I printed mine in "beginner" mode in Cura using HIPS. It is flexible enough to open and snap around the PVC tubing. I think PLA would work just as nicely. How I Designed This I used OnShape (www.onshape.com) to create the 2D sketch of the shape and extruded it. Then exported an STL file of the result.