Umbrella stand repair
I’m in two minds about calling this a repair as nothing was really broken about the stand. It just came this way with a separate bottom, so more of an annoying design. But otherwise it is a nice design and useful.
In it’s prior form, any time you extracted an umbrella, if you moved the stand in any way, it detached from base. The remaining umbrellas then got wedged between the base and outer which are often made it fall over. The base was a different size to the outer and hence there was no way to glue the two together.
I needed some kind of spacer and my first thought was some washers. But it was quite a big gap so would be a lot of washers and hence quite fiddly. So instead I decided to design something in FreeCAD. After measuring the diameters of the base and outer, I created sketch of two circles and then padded it to make a ring. Then using a second sketch was used to cut the ring, to make a short section. Then the last step was to put a hole in it for the bolt.
I printed out 4 of these in black ABS which was what I had in the printer.
The holes needed to be equally space around the rim. To do that, I found the widest point and made 2 marks, then used drew another line at 90 degrees to that. After drilling the outer, I drilled one hole and bolted the base in place. Using a marker pen I marked the 3 other holes and then unbolted them. After drilling the 3 other holes, I tried to reassemble it. Two bolts in and things were just not lining up. So ot was taken apart again and rotate 90 degrees to see of that was a better match. I tried a couple of other permutations to see which was best and there was one where all 4 holes seemed pretty close. So after loosely bolting it together, all was needed was to tighten it up. I used lock nuts so it didn’t need to be tightened so much that the spacers would get crushed.
Posted in: Repairs
Tags: 3d Printing, drilling
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
