Friday, July 31, 2015

Fence Caps

A few moths ago my son in law and I build a fence in my garden. The fence has every 3 meter a vertical pole which is put in concrete for stabilisation. The conplete fence has been coated for weather conditions. However normally the vertical poles are capped by a metal cap to prevent the rain starting to deacy the pole.

And offcourse we did not buy these caps. We just plainly forgot and never had any thoughts about it anymore. Until...we saw these caps at another fence. Now it has been raining a lot lately and I wanted some protection for my hard labour.

So hey I am a Tinkerer right....... so tinker.

I spend a few minutes with my favorite 3D drawing program Tinkercad and there we go. In no time I desgned a cap.



The pole is 6.5 cm sqaure so I designed the inner of the cap to be 6.8 cm. The hight is 2.5 cm and the bottom (which is to be the top of the cap) is 2mm thick and so are the walls. You can find the design here.

So in the end it looks like the pics here:







And yes, I really printed them in several colors. I made 7 caps totally. 2 yellow, 2 orange, 2 in blue and one green. Never a dull moment........ I did not get any comments of the neighbours........yet. Printing time 1 hour 50 minutes pro piece. That is a lot of printing time but I don not have to attend it.

Now several ideas came up. I can put leds in it. I have seven caps so I can make a led sequence. Or I can put some sensors in them like temperature sensors and humidity. If I do I will let you know.
If you need some of these yourself. You can go to the above mentioned Tinkercad link and adjust them for your own needs. 


If your poles have the same size as mine you can download the STL file here below.



Till next time: have fun.

Luc