1.6 Detail Design
CAD Drawings
Our final product is shown below. It is an attachment to a traditional clothing hook. It has the ability to screw onto the end of a clothing hook to enhance its usefulness. A set screw, an industry-standard M8, would be able to be placed onto the wooden dowel through the access hole to support the two items together. There are two main ways of handling this product, as to give the user more choice. The two grips on our product allow the user to either hold it as a handle (lower grip), or to grip the entire product (upper grip). This versatility allows the user to move and maneuver their clothing hook in new ways, while decreasing strain on the user due to the thicker product. This product also allows for some customizability. One possible issue we noticed in the sample videos we found was that the length of the clothing hook could make its use unwieldy. With our product, a user could have a length of the wooden dowel cut off and placed into it such that the effective length is lowered, making it more easily maneuverable. The standard dowel diameter is 1 inch, so this product accommodates that dimension as the inner cavity diameter.
Using information found online, we found that the price to FDM print this piece would likely be prohibitively expensive. Sculpteo and exone websites did not give us the information needed to price our product using FDM. Using craftcloud3d, we found that an individual piece would cost $15.52 to produce. There are some discounts given to mass orders, as 10 pieces costs $149.06, or $14.91 per piece - and 100 pieces costs $1490.63, also $14.91 per piece. The actual cost per item calculated by them is reached at an order of 2 pieces, only incurring an upcharge on a singular order.
Had we decided to print this at the innovation studio, where we would be charged 3 cents per gram of PLA, our total cost would come out to $4.47, as Cura predicted our printed mass was 149 grams.
We decided to use PLA as our material because it is different from most thermoplastic polymers in that it is derived from renewable resources like cornstarch or sugar cane. This means that while it is more environmentally friendly than most other materials, it is also cost efficient. PLA is popularly used as a prototyping material because of its unique properties, such as its ability to control the stereochemical architecture allows precise control over the speed and degree of crystallinity, the mechanical properties, and the processing temperatures of the material. The mechanical properties of lactic acid-based polymers can be varied to a large extent ranging from soft and elastic plastics to stiff and high strength materials. This provides us with the needed flexibility to manufacture our product/prototype depending on our need.
