Thingiverse
Hookinator 3Million by BrienAllison
by Thingiverse
Last crawled date: 5 years, 7 months ago
This was my entry into the Polymaker hook competition and took second place. Now the competition has finished I have decided to publish my design and the original fusion 360 file for people to download it for themselves and see how I designed it.
I have also included an S hook model I used to validate the design. You will see that the hook is thicker than the gap in the S hook, but it is still possible to join them together. This is done by placing the spiral hook at a 45 degree angle (see pictures) and pushing the spiral hook on. The inner spiral loops deform like a volute spring and line up at an angle, such that it can then fit through the 16mm gap, despite being 20mm wide.
My general design idea was to maximise the amount of material which fits in the S-hook (and the amount of material in general) since this is a limiting factor for strength. The spiral shape means the end of the spiral only needs to hold a fraction of the total load carried by the hook. Also by hooking the end onto the S-hook and not itself, it removes a weakness which failed on other designs. Although ironically it was actually the small hook at the end which failed and caused the spiral to unwind and lose the final round. This part of the hook I didn't think much about, but the hook could certainly hold much more load if I redesigned this section (I may have won the competition in the final, who knows) plus other optimisations.
This competition has been a little controversial due to the unclear rules, but it was quite fun to watch anyway. Let's see what the next competition brings.
I have also included an S hook model I used to validate the design. You will see that the hook is thicker than the gap in the S hook, but it is still possible to join them together. This is done by placing the spiral hook at a 45 degree angle (see pictures) and pushing the spiral hook on. The inner spiral loops deform like a volute spring and line up at an angle, such that it can then fit through the 16mm gap, despite being 20mm wide.
My general design idea was to maximise the amount of material which fits in the S-hook (and the amount of material in general) since this is a limiting factor for strength. The spiral shape means the end of the spiral only needs to hold a fraction of the total load carried by the hook. Also by hooking the end onto the S-hook and not itself, it removes a weakness which failed on other designs. Although ironically it was actually the small hook at the end which failed and caused the spiral to unwind and lose the final round. This part of the hook I didn't think much about, but the hook could certainly hold much more load if I redesigned this section (I may have won the competition in the final, who knows) plus other optimisations.
This competition has been a little controversial due to the unclear rules, but it was quite fun to watch anyway. Let's see what the next competition brings.