August 18, 2024
Description
My bathroom sink used a variety of slip joint extension tubes to connect the drain in the sink basin to the trap. These leveraged 1 ¼ inch o-rings with compression fittings to create a watertight path. Over time, the o-rings had degraded (one seemed to be even missing a chunk), resulting in a leak.
As the o-rings were a simple shape made of rubber, and I had plenty of TPU lying around, I thought it was worth a shot to model up a replacement as opposed to trying the various local hardware stores or ordering online and waiting a few days. Long story short - less than an hour of modeling and printing later, my parts worked, and my sink was repaired.
Uploading in case this can help anyone else out.
Print in TPU with either sufficient perimeters to be solid (I used 4) or 100% infill. I used what I had on hand, a ZIRO brand TPU with a Shore A 95 durometer. This worked fine, but I really needed to wrench down the compression fittings to get a watertight seal. I suspect a softer TPU would have worked slightly better, although I see some of the o-rings for these type of joints sold online are made from polyethylene (HPDE - so technically also printable if you happen to have it) which can have durometers of Shore A 90+ so no real surprise a harder washer also worked fine.
License:
Creative Commons — Public Domain