Plastic spring by bagelturf

Learning Engineering

Plastic spring

bagelturf

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Published on January 1, 2013

This thing was Featured on January 1, 2013

Description

An experiment to make a plastic "coil" spring printed in a single piece. The design has concentric cylinders that restrict the movement to mainly vertical and an outer springy part that provides resilience.

The more vertical bars, the stiffer the spring. The more horizontal rings, the greater the extent of movement. It's resistant to twisting, but would do very badly in tension I think.

Also note that the spring part need not be on the outside of the concentric cylinders: it could be embedded between them, so protected from damage.

Instructions

Print with at least two extra shells, use 0.2 layer thickness, and print in ABS. These details are important because it won't work otherwise.

The three shells are needed because the extruded plastic has to bridge the verticals to make the springy parts and it is this material that makes it into a spring. The 0.2 layer thickness ensures that the horizontal rings in the model align with the slicing and they get printed. PLA is probably too stiff to make this a useful object.

The Blender model uses booleans to add the verticals and the horizontals to the basic cylinder objects, so be sure to look on the other layers for those.

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aFoote on March 2, 2013 said:

Printed at .10 infill in Nylon.

Ebbe on February 27, 2013 said:

Hey guys, could you print it just like this? Or did you have to use some support structure? Nice creation bagelturf!

naught101 on January 23, 2013 said:

While this probably isn't terribly useful as a spring, due to the properties of the plastics, I wonder if it would work as a pillow (where a bit of permanent deformation is fine), if you make a 3d mesh? might be a quite useful alternative to something like http://www.bushwalking.org.au/...

code4food on January 4, 2013 said:

Made it and it works. I used accelerated mode on a Rep 1, with 20% infill. Will try it again with 0% infill, and then 100%. Neat project!

sphynx on January 3, 2013 said:

Very clever! A really nice idea.

vector on January 2, 2013 said:

Good idea! , but the problem is the material. It will eventually stretch and the "spring" will stop working. The material needs to have combination of rigidity and elasticity...(that's why real springs are made of spring steel not plastic). I don't wont to be rude, it is nice design and idea but you are wasting plastic, energy and your time with any kind of "plastic spring design", including mine ;).

anewsome on January 4, 2013 said:

I disagree vector. While I haven't made this spring here, I've made a bunch of these: http://www.thingiverse.com/thi... and they work wonderfully. Printed in PLA and spring spring spring. They're all still working just fine.