Motorcycle camping gave me an excuse to fiddle with “space efficient” camping gear. Until a few weeks ago I was limited to truck camping, where bulky and inefficient gear is totally fine.
From a motorcycle (especially given I was carrying a ridiculously bulky CPAP) I sought to reduce encumbrance. I rediscovered the half-forgotten / half-done / half-ass homemade Jetboil accessory design I’d been fiddling with (before I got sick). Here’s a photo of the Jetboil in its natural habitat. Below is the “coffee ground holder cup” that fits in the tiny “wasted space” between the heating fins. Below that is the garish red cover that replaces the OEM protective cup. (The original part is battered and cracked.)
The Jetboil functions fine and is old enough to vote. But it got me thinking of gear which I haven’t properly assessed in forever.
In the photo below, the upper left shows my two (!) coffee ground containers (when truck camping I carry excess coffee… because it’s coffee). On the upper right is the “coffee ground container” from my “3d printed era”. The tiny container holds enough for three pots of French Press. (Plenty for an overnight.)
On the second row left side are my salt and pepper shakers. They’re ancient. I haven’t had to add salt or pepper in so many years I can’t recall. I don’t know why I’ve been carrying multiple year’s volume of salt and pepper but I have. That’s dumb!
The little black cylinder is a small salt shaker model I found on-line and printed. It was my plan to make a couple little shakers; as a nod toward efficiency.
Unfortunately my 3d printer kept screwing up with the little salt shaker. Meanwhile an unexpected 3d printing project “sprang up”. A dude needed a cell phone case. We settled on a model that’s a replica of a “Pokedex”. I don’t know what a Pokedex is, but I like the design.
Unfortunately, my 3d printer was giving me fits. I had several failures. I tweaked a thousand slicer settings, dried my filament repeatedly, and swapped out a shiny new print bed. The quality improved to “good enough but still shitty”. I hadn’t figured out the problem but I at least got an object done.
Low quality vexes me but the design is great. The front cover is pure gold! A “nudge based” mind game built into phones is that nobody covers the screen. This is the only case we found that “closes like a book”. People are programmed otherwise. They can’t bear to cover that screen! If you think about it, the part of a phone that gets cracked and scratched is the screen. A protective case ought to cover it.
Covering the phone’s touchscreen is a game changer! It alters your mind’s relationship with the object. Phones are as addictive as cigarettes (or heroin!). Carefully observe your personal addictive behavior. It sounds stupid but covering the screen separates you from it’s incessant attention whoring. It’s probably good for you. (Also, no more butt dials.)
After a lot of “testing and investigation”, I figured out the problem with the 3d printer. The object below is the back of a print head heating unit. There are supposed to be four absurdly small screws. I have three. Where did the fourth go? No idea.
The three remaining screws were very loose. The tiny flex induced by the loose mount was the cause of everything. What an obscure thing to cause such annoyance! I tightened the three remaining screws and it made a huge difference.
I already ordered the part to fix it. The screw probably costs a nickel but I had to buy the whole assembly. No complaints. $20 for a heater assembly after working my printer like a rented mule for a year and a half ain’t bad. (I’ll keep the old part for spare.)
I also ordered filament (PLA) in the proper colors. If you’re such a nerd to know what a Pokedex is, you know the colors are wrong. I’ll reprint a higher quality version with the proper color scheme as soon as the filament arrives. (The design doesn’t work for my phone or I’d make a duplicate for myself.)
I had less luck with the salt shaker. (Photos from period of 3d print quality issues.)
Those parts don’t fit right. It could have been bad print quality issues or too tight tolerance. Regardless, it was a rabbit hole and I dove in headfirst. A salt shaker is merely a cylinder that’s knurled, threaded, and hollow. What kind of pansy must rely on someone else to do the math? I ought to man up and design my own shit.
So, I did.
Except I focused on stuff to nest in my Coleman camp pot. (Don’t let the shininess fool you, I’ve used it many times.)
For this rabbit hole I switched from Fusion 360 (which endlessly bitches about upgrades and constantly phones home in a series of unholy cloud based processes) to FreeCAD (which is easy to install, free, Linux friendly, and keeps its data on my local hard drive as God intended). This is not without a cost. FreeCAD is brutal about flawless mathematic constraints and I am relearning a new system. The discipline it imposes will make me a better modeler but sheesh is it hard at first!
My first attempt sucked. (This is also when I was having print quality issues.)
You’d think “make it knurled” would be the press of a button. It isn’t! I had to make a subtractive helix, mirror it in the opposite spiral, and then project a polar array of both. THis should have worked but there are some bugs in the open source system. It “overcomputed” and curbstomped my fairly decent miniPC into slag.
Eventually I found the issues, unchecked a few boxes, and now it can manage it’s math. It was an intellectual adventure, as if high school geometry had a touch of horror movie.
But there’s a reward. I’ve learned the dark lore of subtractive helix patterning and I feel pretty smug about it!
I also learned the similar and equally weird secret knowledge of thread pitch and tolerance between the mating surfaces. Fascinating eh?
Some people watch TV. I learn the programming of esoteric geometry. We all relax in our own way.
Here’s a screenshot of the lid. Internal threads and external knurling. I modeled it from scratch. The Curmudgeon has proven he’s Adaptive!
I gained more skills. Here’s a photo from mid process. Remember, this is a prototype! I was having print quality issues. I also chose to print with a larger (thus less refined) nozzle. A larger nozzle is increased strength and faster printing. (It’s a thing I’ll use to carry coffee grounds and non-dairy creamer. Making it “pretty” wasn’t my game.
I also used whatever scrap filament was at hand; thus the unmatched colors. This caused Mrs. Curmudgeon a great deal of angst. She won’t be camping with this gear so I don’t mind.
What you can’t see in this picture is the awesome part. The internal threads mate up with almost no effort yet lock tight with infinite precision. 4mm pitch with 2mm tolerance baby! That which you can’t see is enough to make me smile.
I did more refinement, some in the modeling software, some in the slicer.
The end result is very satisfyingly. Two bespoke containers fit in the nested camp cups like their whole universe was bent to that purpose (which it was… if you consider me the creator of the objects).
The threads are so smooth they make me smile. The 0.06 nozzle printed so strong that I can chuck them at a raccoon and it’ll bounce of their thieving skull with nary a scratch.
The one on the right has “grip serrations” on the base. They fit the hand nicely even if they don’t photograph well. It seemed overkill for the one on the left so I didn’t reprint with that feature. I could match the knurling or make more cosmetic tweaks, but they’re already functionally perfect; if a little ugly.
They fit with only a few millimeters to spare. Perfect!
This all started with a goofy accessory to my Jetboil. Have I messed with that? Yes. It’s in process now. I consider it a form of FreeCAD training.
As for the salt & pepper shakers I took the wimpy way out and found a nicer model. It printed great on my now properly tuned 3d printer.
My next campout will be truck based and not motorcycle based. (I’m waiting on a replacement tire for my PC800.) But it’s all good. The true goal was learning. Replacing ten year old Tupperwear with stuff that’s super efficient in a saddlebag is just a side effect of knowledge.