I have a cheap/quick/dirty deer and rabbit fence around our vegetable garden. The doors are simple PVC squares with deer netting that used to attach to the fence via hooks at the top. This design turned out to be very fiddly. The new design seems much easier to manage - simply drop the door section into its slot.
Curious what material you used.
I made some similar items, and given the aggregation of exposure to the elements, constant daylight, and strength/the potential to shatter, I veered away from PLA and ABS into PETG (with TPU sleeves on sensitive bits), which I’ve found worked really well, but my parts don’t move as much as yours probably do.
How have you found the results in these regards?
Absolutely love being able to quickly mock up fit for purpose parts and deploy them immediately; great work!
This is ASA. I’ve had some PLA+ parts that have been outside for 7-8 years and are holding up really well. The old garden gate hooks were PETG and were still in pretty good shape after 3 full seasons and had to flex pretty often.
Granted, I live in SE MI so our sun isn’t super duper intense.
And totally agree, once you get in the mode of “I can print something to make this better” you start finding more and more things to make.
ABS has worked out pretty well for me even in direct sunlight.
I designed a fun little replacement for this thing on my parents’ gate and it’s still there over 7 years later in all the weather and even intense heat over 110°F on some days.
Is ABS problematic in sun? I wouldn’t think it was, since it’s been used for decades in the automotive world on exposed stuff (I have a 90’s motorcycle with a fair bit of exposed ABS and it’s surprisingly fine).
Maybe the auto world has additives for stability?
ABS generally requires additional additives for UV resistance, and plain ABS will degrade relatively quickly in full sun.
There’s a section in this study on the change in mechanical properties of ABS resins in simulated weather environments https://mirror.wide-net.org/pub/b/plastic/abs-yellowing-etc-CIB9222.pdf