Originally shared by Stephen Baird
There have been questions lately about the durability of resin prints and their utility as printed objects, so I thought I’d share an example of a utility print I’ve done recently.
My dishwasher, a Kitchenaid, has some funny design choices in its wheels. They’re retained by a post that sticks all the way through the wheel and carriage and which is held in place by a lip on the post.
That’s all well and good, except the interior of a dishwasher is packed with abrasives so that lip on the post (which points into the main washing area) gets worn down over time. Eventually the wheels pop off with very little force, or even just fall off under their own power. Sometimes those wheels even end up too close to the heated drying coils and turn into nice little lumps of plastic slag.
When the dishwasher started regularly losing five of its eight wheels, and completely lost one to the heated drying coils, I decided it was time to fix it. The dishwasher now has seven of its eight retaining posts that are 3D printed resin and one entire wheel that’s resin. So far, after a couple washes, they seem to be holding up. The temperature isn’t an issue and they’re not sanding away so quickly that they’re useless, so I’m hopeful they’ll be a decent relatively long term solution.
These were all printed in DruckWege clear on a YHD-101, and the files (in case you happen to have your own misbehaving Kitchenaid) can be found here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2418822
