In my last Steemit article, my dad asked me to print a drain cover because there were not any spare parts available or left in shops. This time my mom called me for some help and she had the same kind of problem. My mom owns a Moulinex grinding machine from the 70´th century and one of its very vital parts was broken. Naturally, the grinding machine is useless without that part.
It´s very interesting to follow how people are changing how they are thinking when counting problems. Nowadays most of the solutions are to print new or updated parts to cover old ones. I have to admit that my parents are nowadays a little bit more oriented to think about printing than my colleagues when they are thinking about problem-solving. I guess that's good and somehow a little bit surprising because my colleagues are cad designers.
This time the printed part is holding the rotating blade. Original white holder was broken and gear wheel was not able to rotate to blade because this connection part was broken. The challenge in designing this new spare part was a small detail of gear wheel or rack. It was even hard to calculate the amount of those gears. After some time, I was able to copy all details of the holder and design these 40-years-old shapes into a digital format. I planned to print multiple spare parts at the same time to secure machine's working as I don't want to jeopardize my mom's' cooking.
The printing time for those three parts was 4h and I had to use the smallest nozzle to print the fine details. The size of the nozzle was 0.25 mm. The printing technology is an excellent way to give more lifetime to the old machines like this grinder, especially if it´s impossible to buy spare parts.
-Markos86
