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solarbirdI haven’t posted about the project storage system in a while because it’s partly about durability testing and that takes time. But! I do have a problem, and I have solved it. It’s not actually with the project itself – so far the design is working perfectly, everything’s holding up really well on the main rack, there’s no signs of sagging or really any bad behaviour at all, despite everything just being an assortment of plain PLAs.
The problem is with adhesives. Because push comes to shove, PLA might be plant-derived, but it’s still a plastic, and I keep having adhesives fail on the single-unit mounting point next to my desk.
Part of the idea with this project is that you can have small accessory mounting points wherever you want. Pick a project off the wall in its project bin, carry it somewhere, put it on the desk – or on another mounting point, so your desk or whatever stays clear.
But unlike the large vertical storage rack, there’s no backplane and no metal side clamps holding everything together. It’s just a single unit. All that other nonsense is going way overboard if there’s only the one.
I thought – honestly thought – that heavy-weight-bearing command strips would work for this situation. I mean, you can get them in multi-kilogram-rated varieties! Do all the steps right, I thought; it’ll work great. But, well, plastic’s low surface energy makes fools of us all, I guess, and my test point next to my desk absolutely wouldn’t stay stuck to any of them.
And by any of them, I mean not even carpet tape.
(I got desperate, okay? Didn’t work. And before you ask: HSB tape is not the answer. HSB is for high-surface-energy materials. Plastic is a low-surface-energy material.)
I even tried making an aluminium back, attached to the PLA with a layer of plastic epoxy. Still didn’t work. The aluminium (mostly) stayed on, but the adhesives came off the aluminium too. I’m confused by that, but, well, here we are.
So I thought about it for a while and made a wall unit with diagonal nail holes.
Now that’s not quite enough by itself – it’s close, but not ideal – because the plate is going to want to tilt, even with 45° holes. But adding a layer of low-adhesive removable poster tape – which is extremely gentle to walls – seems to have done the trick, and I’ve updated the project with the new object.
So we officially have a version 1.1 of this thing. Go download it, if you’re into experimental storage system development. Or just want a place to hang some projects. ^_^
Obviously, I’d prefer to come up with something that doesn’t involve visible nail heads. But there are plenty of times when such a solution is perfectly acceptable. And I can and should make a version that has slide-hole screw mount support too, I think, and that should both remove the need for the poster tape entirely and be pretty invisible.
Honestly, part of the reason I went with angled nails for version 1.1 is that I just didn’t want screw-sized holes in my walls for a testing object, much less screw anchors embedded in there. And 45° wire nails leave only really small, really-easily-patchable holes behind. So this really has very little wall impact.
But damn, is it solid. So far. I say “so far,” but there’s a feel to something you know is going to work, right? You know that feeling? I do. And I think this is going to work. At least, from the attachment side. And it’ll make a good test as well for PLA stability – if the nails over time dig through the PLA, that’s data! And the kind of test this round of testing is supposedly for. Everybody wins.
I hope. ^_^
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
