Replacement part for clothes horse used for drying clothes

An unexpected gust of wind and all our wet clothes drying outside were suddenly on the floor.

Worse was to come when we realised that one of the plastic joints that the clothes rails hook onto had broken. While the rest of the dryer was useable it did seem a shame not to try and use my “the expensive toy,” as my wife calls it, Prusa-Mini, to fix it!

Looking at the broken part (pictures below) it was proving difficult to work out the best geometry to try and copy it, this along with the fact that it used two screws to secure it onto the frame.

So instead of an exact duplicate I came up with the idea of just making the arm on one side of the joint. While the original was a much softer plastic that required the screws to hold it in place, I printed the new part in PETG which is much stiffer. With the use of callipers to measure the diameter of the frame it only took two attempts to get the tolerance such that the part very securely snaps onto the frame. There is a small hole in the frame into which the peg on the inside of the new part cleanly fits. The resulting part sits very nicely on the build plate and there is just a small amount of support material needed which mostly self-detaches when you pull it off the build plate.

The result is that the clothes dryer is now repaired and even better, should it collapse again in the wind and another joint snaps, I can just print a replacement in just over half an hour.