There are many differences between men and women, and it’s beyond the scope of a 3D printing blog to go into them here. Suffice it to say that today we’re interested in one small divergence: the fact that men, uniquely, stand up to relieve their bladders.
Which is all very well when toilet seats have been correctly installed and behave themselves, but a faulty or poorly balanced seat can cause embarrassment, and even permanent injury, should gravity take its inevitable course: the raised seat can quickly take on the characteristics of a guillotine, to disastrous results.
Since this is precisely what happens in the 3D Genius household, something had to be done about it. And that something was to design and print a seat holder, using our tool of choice, 123D Design. We’ve covered it many times before, from our getting started guide on; here’s how we can use it to make the holder we needed.
Note: this holder was designed for a toilet with a back board enclosing the cistern, which could be screwed into. For a system in which the cistern is free standing, you’d need a much longer arm on the hook to allow it to be affixed directly to the wall behind.
1. Start with a box
This is the simplest 3D object you can make. I’ve sized this to match the measurements I took of the distance from the wall to the edge of the seat, with a few millimetres added onto the end to give thickness to the hook:
2. Sketch out a rectangle
The easiest way to turn this box into an L-shaped box is to draw a rectangle on its upper face first. Note how the rectangle overlaps the edge, sticking out far beyond it; all we’re concerned about is the area of overlap:
3. Choose the Extrude command
When you click on the rectangle, a menu of icons pops up indicating the operations you can carry out. Choose the Extrude icon, fourth from the left:
4. Extrude downwards
Drag down, and the rectangle will be highlighted in red. As it goes down, you can see how it automatically removes itself from the starting box. Extrude it down below ground level, just for safety’s sake, then hit Enter to apply the effect.
5. The resulting shape
After you hit Enter, the extruded shape will be removed from the box. You can see that the original rectangle remains visible, as a ghostly reminder of its origin:
6. Delete the rectangle
You don’t need this rectangle any more, as it’s fulfilled its purpose. Click on it, and press Delete to get rid of it:
7. Make a cylinder
Now for the hinge. Choose the cylinder primitive from the icons at the top, and draw a cylinder that matches the height of the L-shaped rectangle. You should find it snaps to it, allowing easy alignment:
8. Draw a circle
We can make the hole in the cylinder in exactly the same way as cutting out the shape from the original box. Draw a circle on top of the cylinder, aligning it with the centre of the cylinder:
9. Extrude the circle
Just as with the cutout of the box, extrude the circle downwards to make a hole all the way through the cylinder:
10. Fillet the edge
To make the front edge a more pleasing shape, we can Fillet it – which means rounding it off. Select just the edge in question (highlighted here in green), and choose Fillet from the pop-up icon menu:
11. Drag to fillet
You can drag the arrow to increase the amount of the fillet. I’ve gone for a generous rounding, simply because it will look more attractive than a squared-off shape:
12. Carry on filleting
While we’re at it, we may as well round off all the hard edges. After selecting the first edge and choosing the Fillet icon, you can then continue to select other edges and fillet them all together:
13. Make the base
The base starts with two primitives: a thin cylinder, and a thin rectangle. Overlap them, then draw a circle on the surface and extrude downwards, just as before. It will be removed from both objects:
14. Merge the objects
It makes sense to merge the cylinder and box into one single object, for ease of handling. Select one of them, and choose Merge from the Combine icon at the top. Select the other object, and hit Enter. This will merge the two together:
15. Rotate by moving
To turn the object around, select it and choose Move from the icon menu:
16. Rotate by dragging
Drag on the rotation handle to rotate the object 90°, so it’s standing upright. You’ll also want to drag it vertically so it’s sitting on the ground once again:
17. Duplicate the object
The simplest way to duplicate an object is to Copy and Paste. The copy will appear directly on top of the original; drag it using the directional arrows to move the two apart:
18. Make a base
Make a simple box to hold the two shapes. It only needs to be thin; a thickness of 3mm should be plenty:
19. Position the elements
Arrange all the elements to leave a gap large enough for the hook section. And while we’re at it, we may as well fillet those corners to make them more rounded:
20. Drill a hole
In fact, drill a couple of holes – you know how to do this by now. To make them neater, we can allow screws to be countersunk, by selecting the hole perimeter and using the chamfer command to flatten it out:
21. Make the pin
The pin is a simple cylinder, fractionally smaller than the holes in the objects:
22. Oops! Think again!
The best-laid plans… when I duplicated the holders, I figured out that the hook was 10mm thick, so I needed to move the duplicate holder 12mm from the original to allow a 1mm gap either side. Makes perfect sense, right? Wrong. I’d forgotten to allow for the thickness of the holders themselves. Back to the drawing program…
But then, that, in essence, is what 3D printing is all about: the ability to make mistakes, and to adjust them as you go along, until you arrive at the perfect result.