Drinking water cat guard

thingiverse

We discovered that our cat hops up by the sink and licks the drips from the filtered drinking water faucet. This is one of several attempts to keep the cat away from the drips! It's important that this is installed so water doesn't hit it, else the cat will lick those drips. I.e., rotate it so the drips miss the bars. It is bent to approximately match the arc of the water. The photos show earlier versions that weren't satisfactory, as well as the culprit cat in action. The early versions tried to be stronger by using cross linkages, but this one uses thicker bars instead. The cross linkages would get wet as the water stopped running, and the cat would lick them instead of the faucet! The current version never touches the water, so the cat loses interest. Now she licks the main sink sprayer head instead! But at least that's not used directly for human drinking water, so we've made some progress! Instructions I printed this in ABS at medium resolution, smoothed it with a file, then vapor polished it in a can with acetone vapor to make it stronger and shiny. I used 25% infill and a raft but no support. I had to manually set the guard position one layer below the build platform, or I'd get a gap between the raft and the first layer that caused the print to fail. Must be something wrong with the .stl generated by Inventor. One piece here mimics the faucet tip, and is not needed, but helps show how the design is intended to work. To install, slip the guard far back on the faucet tube, then install the tapered interlocking ring so its taper is larger toward the faucet end, then slide the guard down and slip it onto the ring. There are two slightly different ring sizes here. One may fit better than the other.