Is your chair missing feet? I'd like to fix it for free.

Announcement:

New service: 3D printed replacement chair feet: bring me your broken or missing chair feet!

If you have a chair that needs replacement feet, drop me a line, perhaps I can help you keep your chair out of the landfill.

Background: 

For the past two years, I have made and sold 3D printed replacement feet for the IKEA Gilbert chair. It has been a fun side project that allows me to prevent broken chairs from going into the trash heap.

Discussion:

I was recently contacted by a lovely person named Joy who saw that I sold chair feet for the IKEA Gilbert chair, and wondered if I could make replacement feet for her chairs, too?

My answer was yes, if your chair feet are easily 3D printable.

Which made me realize that perhaps I should actively look for additional chair feet that can be 3D printed, to expand my offerings.

So, if you have a chair with missing feet and I don't already make those chair feet, let me see if I can help!

Just like I did with the IKEA Gilbert chair feet, I'll both release the files so anyone with a 3D printer can make their own, and I'll sell feet so people who don't have access to a 3D printer can keep their chairs from becoming landfill.

Details of the deal:

1. You contact me here.
2. I'll get back to you via email and ask you to send me photos of your chair's feet, and some rough dimensions.
3. If I think they'll work, I'll ask you to ship me one of your chair feet (or more, if your chair feet aren't all the same for some reason).
4. After a week or so, I'll return your chair foot, plus the 3D printed feet you need (for free).
5. I'll then post the files online (with the creative commons attribution, non commercial license) so anyone can make their own chair feet.
6. I'll sell the feet on the replacementfeet.simpleswitchlabs.com website.

Glass frame screw caps for exterior house doors

The rear entry area of our home is very dark, so we decided that an easy way to add light was to replace our old, drafty, malfunctioning rear entry door with a modern door with a glass panel to allow more light.

Our first problem was that our rear door happens to be pretty small - 30 inches wide.
Most exterior doors are now 36 inches wide, so to get what we want, we'd have to special order at about three times the cost of the doors in stock at our local stores.  My partner in crime had the brilliant idea of searching craigslist for 60 inch wide double entry doors, since that would give us a door with exactly the width we want (and an extra door to do something with?).  With a little patience, we located a set of used wooden entry doors, so we took our new door home to strip off paint, fill in holes, and generally clean everything up.

Missing screw caps in the glass frame

Second problem: the screw caps were missing from the frame around the glass in the door.
I first went to Lowe's to ask if they had those caps and was told that no, no ones sells them, they come with new doors, and nowhere else. I searched the internet and found that the guys at Lowes were right, those caps can't be purchased!
So, I took some careful measurements, 3D printed some screw caps in white ABS, popped them in place with a mallet, and they look great!

gently tapping in with a mallet

18 new screw caps

Caps in place

How 3D printing saves time and money

It's been close to a year and a half since I purchased my current 3D printer (it cost about $1200 at the time, but you can pick one up for about $950 today), and I've lost track of how many times over it has paid for itself, but here's a list of some ways my printer has paid for itself around the house:

Ceiling fan with 3D printed globe retainer clips

How to redesign a kitchen pantry

We're rehabilitating our new home. Here's how we redesigned our kitchen pantry.

Before: dirty and unusable, lots of wasted space.

Problem 1. The shelves were few (3) and too deep (24 and 36 inch)

In a situation like a pantry, instead of a small number of deep shelves, you want many shallow shelves to reduce situations where one object hides behind another.
The deep shelves also cause dark shadows at the back of the pantry, making it even less usable.
To fix this situation, we'll increase the number of shelves from 3 to 5 and reduce the depth from 24 and 36 inches to 12 inches.
To ensure that we use our available storage space efficiently, we're creating L-shaped shelves which increases the linear shelf space by more than 50%.

Problem 2. The interior was coated with flat paint. 

Anyplace where you want clean or disinfected, you need to use a semgloss or high gloss paint.  Unlike flat paint, glossy surface coatings are water resistant, cleanable and resist sticky substances (like food spills).  Additionally, flat paint soaks up light, making the pantry seem dark and dingy, not attributes I want where we store our food.
To maximize visibility and cleanliness, we used a low-voc white semigloss paint.

Problem 3. Shelves were held up with 2x4s.

Using a 2x4 in your food pantry to hold a shelf is not only overkill, it looks clunky, wastes space, and when working on a closet for a few hours, I'd rather not deal with material that bulky or heavy. We decided to go with pre-primed 1x2 for the long shelves along the rear of the closet and twin-track standards for the short shelves along the right side.

Design goals:

• Maximize storage space without making things hard to see or reach
• Solid shelves instead of wire shelves - wire shelves are bad for small objects and useless during spills
• Sometimes food gets messy: make everything easy to clean
• As always, re-use as much material as possible

Let's get started!

3D Printing: Ceiling Fan Repair

I have three matching ceiling fans in my house, but when I moved in, one of them was missing both the glass light globe and the retaining ring.

Before: ceiling fan without a globe

What the other fans look like.

Everything is Broken

Broken plate, ca. 1890

My favorite thing to do is to fix something that has broken.  I love saving something from the discard pile and breathing new life into it. Even better is watching it trundle off to make someone else's life better.

This has been on my mind because everything seems to be breaking lately.  The water main, my laptop, the fence, and now even the water heater needs attention.

When I was a kid, my little brother and sister would receive cheap electric toys that broke almost immediately. So I started collecting wire, batteries, and motors from older broken toys and using them to fix the latest batch of broken toys.

Over at FreeGeek Chicago, I take apart old computers, replace worn parts, and install new operating systems, and then I get to see those repaired old machines help out the neighborhood, close the digital divide, and reduce electronic waste.

When I lived in Madison, WI, I stumbled onto how easy it is to find and repair broken propane and charcoal grills and then sell them on Craigslist. I did that in my spare time one summer and those grills paid for my February Mexican vacation that year.