Dog bowl holder
19 Jan 2019First, a little back story. After Bracken’s last injury the physiotherapist recommended that Nicky raised her food bowl up when she was being fed, to alter the weight distribution on her legs when she eats. So Nicky put her bowl onto the little fold up step stool we have.
Unfortunately Bracken, being a Labrador, is a little excited when it comes to food, so at least every other meal part way through they’d be a crash as the bowl got licked off the stool.
As I’ve learned, once you’ve got a 3D printer a lot of things turn out to be a job for the 3D printer, and this seemed like a good first project to try in Fusion 360.
All of my previous models, which I’ll get around to posting online and writing up later, have been built in Blender, which works fine, but can be a little tricky to do some changes in.
The design
So after watching a few tutorials to get my head around the way you’re supposed to do things, I ended up with this…
Building it into two parts has some benefits:
- Can be printed without any supports.
- Can iterate each part separately.
The larger flat part fits into the hand-hold in the stool, while the smaller cone shaped bit fits inside the bottom of the bowl, stopping it from sliding.
So how did it print…
At the top of the image you can see the various attempts at the cone, going from left to right. The second smaller because I didn’t realize that the diameter of the bottom post was locked to the diameter of the top cone, I clicked in the wrong place and didn’t notice it shrink when I needed to make the post smaller to fit in the hole.
The first version of the plate would rotate and pivot out of the hole if you pushed it from the long sides, so I added the wings and made it taller.
The ‘finished’ product
This version works, and we haven’t had any movement of the bowl.
The workflow in Fusion 360 is a bit strange coming from a 3D modeling background but being able to change the dimensions in the sketch and having the final part update makes changes much quicker.
After a couple of weeks using it we haven’t had any incidents so I’m calling it a success.