10/12/20
My Dad asked me to design him some feet for plantpots outside to keep them from rotting the deck planks underneath them. He drew a rough design of what they were to look like, naming it "The Puck" due to its resemblance to a hockey puck. I took this design and got straight to work in autodesk inventor. While I thought them simple at first, they posed a number of design challenges to overcome. They had to be able to:

1. Be strong enough to support the weight of the heavy plantpots and soil

2. Provide a way for the water to escape to provent rotting

3. Be relatively aesthetically pleasing

4. Be able to survive plastic contraction in the winter and warpage/melting in the summer

5. Be optomised to use as little as plastic as possible while providing all of the above features without compromising in size

I slowly improved the design through a number of smaller test prints until I reached a design that I was pleased with. For the final version, I decided that I wanted to make it a bit more interesting, so I exported the .stl at a low resoloution. This gave the final prints a sort of triangular-tessalated look instead of being completely round, which I was very happy with. Version 3 supported all of the design requirements, so I printed 8 of them out and put them under the plantpots. Due to their thick walls, I was able to save on plastic by lowering the infill to only 10%, bringing the plastic required for each puck from 26g to 20g each. They were printed using black Creality PLA with a nozzle temp of 300 degrees and a bed temp of 50 degrees on my Ender 5. As of this day, they’re still going strong!