February 3, 2024
Description
This is a recipe for creating your own custom fingernail guards. I recently lost a fingernail in a random accident, and I wanted to have something to cover up my otherwise-exposed nailbed. I tried rabid_pigeon's artificial nail (https://www.printables.com/model/446905-artificial-fingernail) but it wasn't quite right for me, and I found it difficult to appropriately scale to my own fingers. So I decided to make a parametric recipe to help others make their own!
You can print the included STL, but unless your finger is an awful lot like my right pinky finger, it probably won't be quite right for you. You'll need OpenSCAD and BOSL2 (https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2) to use the customizer to make your own version.
The nice curve/arc for the tip of this thing is provided by a cylindric section. You do not need to have a good intuition for how that works: just play with the bottom three parameters in the customizer and you'll start to get the idea for how your options work. It's a quick print, so keep tweaking until it looks and feels good to you. (Oh, and if you're still healing, err on the side of being a little looser. Constriction hurt me like the dickens!)
For instance, the round/oval manicure shaped example uses 18 degrees of rotation and a -1.7 radius offset at the set sizes. By playing with the max height cutoff, you can get various broader or boxier shapes.
License:
Creative Commons — Public Domain