Clipboard pen holder, secured by a binder clip

thingiverse

This is a pen holder that is held onto a clipboard or book cover with a sleeve. The sleeve is squeezed onto the clipboard by a 25 mm binder clip (1 inch in ye olde unitſ) like this, which holds everything very securely in place. The pen clip is sized so that you can thermo-form it to suit your pen. You will need 1x 25 mm/1 inch binder clip. Print Settings Rafts: No Supports: No Infill: Less than 50% Post-Printing Slip this clip onto your clipboard, and then put the binder clip through the hole so that its jaws rest inside the rectangular indents at the front of the clip. Remove the handles of the binder clip by squeezing them inwards at the base. The pen clip is intentionally large so that you can mold it around whatever pen you want to use. If you've printed it in PLA, you can dip the clip into just-boiled water to make it soft enough to mold by hand. If you've printed it in ABS, you may need to use a heat gun to do the same. How I Designed This This design is a proof-of-concept that presents my solution to one of the issues I keep running into when printing practical objects out of PLA. PLA is great for a lot of things, but one thing it is not great for is keeping its shape when it's being squeezed or spread. So if you were to make a simple clip out of PLA and use it to hold something, it would conform to being stretched out over time and lose clamping pressure in the process. I suspect that this is a problem for all plastics (to differing extents) which is why many manufacturers go for the extra expense of making two-piece spring-loaded clips, like this one on the back of a kitchen timer: I chose to use binder clips because they are inexpensive and easy to find, and they're trivial to assemble with the clip. They come in a variety of sizes with different clamping forces, so I look forward to integrating binder clips with more designs in the future. Custom Section Tinkercad source document https://www.tinkercad.com/things/819RrLQ2L7y-binder-clip-enabled-pen-clip