I designed and made a thing!
I have a cheap/quick/dirty deer and rabbit fence around our vegetable garden. The doors are simple PVC squares with deer netting that used to attach to the fence via hooks at the top. This design turned out to be very fiddly. The new design seems much easier to manage - simply drop the door section into its slot.
Curious what material you used.
I made some similar items, and given the aggregation of exposure to the elements, constant daylight, and strength/the potential to shatter, I veered away from PLA and ABS into PETG (with TPU sleeves on sensitive bits), which I've found worked really well, but my parts don't move as much as yours probably do.
How have you found the results in these regards?
Absolutely love being able to quickly mock up fit for purpose parts and deploy them immediately; great work!
This is ASA. I've had some PLA+ parts that have been outside for 7-8 years and are holding up really well. The old garden gate hooks were PETG and were still in pretty good shape after 3 full seasons and had to flex pretty often.
Granted, I live in SE MI so our sun isn't super duper intense.
And totally agree, once you get in the mode of "I can print something to make this better" you start finding more and more things to make.
ABS has worked out pretty well for me even in direct sunlight.
I designed a fun little replacement for this thing on my parents’ gate and it’s still there over 7 years later in all the weather and even intense heat over 110°F on some days.
Is ABS problematic in sun? I wouldn't think it was, since it's been used for decades in the automotive world on exposed stuff (I have a 90's motorcycle with a fair bit of exposed ABS and it's surprisingly fine).
Maybe the auto world has additives for stability?
ABS generally requires additional additives for UV resistance, and plain ABS will degrade relatively quickly in full sun.
There's a section in this study on the change in mechanical properties of ABS resins in simulated weather environments https://mirror.wide-net.org/pub/b/plastic/abs-yellowing-etc-CIB9222.pdf
I never would have thought to print them at an angle like that, but thinking it through, I bet relative to other obvious-ish options, it a) improved part strength (particularly along the axes where you most need strength), b) saved a bit of material, c) improved bed adhesion. Smart move in general. I'll have to keep that approach in mind for my own prints.
Printing things at a 45 degree angle is a magic cheat code for tons of overhangs. It can also help give your prints more resolution as most designs tend to not care if the "tall" layers are diagonally oriented.
Props for proper print orientation for stress distribution.
I did some testing for some parts for my dad, he keeps bees and lost a shaft support for one of his tools when he was reassembling it, he whipped up a replacement and fired me the stl when I was talking about my printers.
Printing with the shaft in the z needed a lot of supports,
laying it on its "back" was by far the easiest, outside of the support looked a little gross, could have benefitted from supports. Did them all in petg, gave them all to him just so he can get a feel for what 3D printed parts look like as he's interested in getting one himself (trying to sell him on a v0 if he's not sure, but kinda thinking about doing a trident)
I love stuff like this, that fits together like a couple of puzzle pieces and uses tension to stay close. Not only is it satisfying to operate, but it's actually super accessible. I will say deer don't play nice, and I have had them hop a fence that was about garden height in the past. Not sure how high this is, but I have also never seen them work a tension lock before. Good job either way, it's nice to make something you feel good about.
The fence is about 6.5 feet tall and seems to keep deer out pretty well. Our garden is near a creek that deer like to walk along, but I've never caught a deer in our garden if I remember to put all the gates on.
Great work!
Looks good!