Round Hair Clip

thingiverse

A round hair clip. Instructions I designed this in anticipation of receiving my 3D printer kit and putting it together, so I have not yet actually printed this. In theory, the design should work fine resized directly to whatever clip size is desired. Because it relies on slight compression in the hinge/peg and flex in the slot/tab interface to keep it together, I hypothesize that it will work better with ABS than PLA. The initial idea was requested and drawn up on a piece of paper by a friend. I did the initial design in Inkscape to figure out sizes and shapes. For lack of a better tool flow, the spike locations were generated with Libreoffice and a little trig. The final design was constructed as parts in FreeCAD, converted to meshes, then exported to STL. The STL looks good imported into OpenSCAD, and Slic3r had no problem generating GCode that looked good in tatlin. For some reason skeinforge crashed on the STL after a few stages with some obscure error. UPDATE 2012-03-20: version 3. A friend with a working 3D printer printed this for me, which prompted me to 1) fix the peg, which was broken in my last update, and 2) change the diameter of the whole structure, which I had messed up by confusing radius vs diameter when I originally created it (I thought it looked funny, but wasn't sure why). This one should actually work as a hair clip!