I learned a long time ago, that having cool toys (like my 3D printer) goes over much better when I can make practical stuff for around the house.

So my very first real project was to print some curtain ring stops. Our curtains have grommets to hold them on a rod, but the stop at the end of the curtain rod is slightly smaller than the hole in the grommet. From time to time, the curtain pops off the end of the rod. This doesn’t bother me, I’m 6’-4” tall (1.93m for those metricized folks) and I just reach up and put it back on. My wife, not being nearly as tall curses every time the curtain comes off the end.

It takes about 12 minutes to print one disk (about 50mm diam and , so I ganged them up and 3mm thick) and printed 4 at a time.

Here’s what the disk looks like when screwed onto the end cap:

and what it looks like when installed:

I’ve ordered some silver filament to print the disks for the living areas, and will use the white ones (I ordered black, white and blue filament with my printer) in my wife’s sewing studio.

The disks are a fairly simple geometry, so I decided to model them using OpenSCAD:

translate([0, 0, 0]) {
 difference() {
  cylinder(h=3, r=25, center=true);
  cylinder(h=3, r=2.5, center=true);
 }
}

translate([60, 0, 0]) {
 difference() {
  cylinder(h=3, r=25, center=true);
  cylinder(h=3, r=2.5, center=true);
 }
}

translate([0, 60, 0]) {
 difference() {
  cylinder(h=3, r=25, center=true);
  cylinder(h=3, r=2.5, center=true);
 }
}

translate([0, 60, 0]) {
 difference() {
  cylinder(h=3, r=25, center=true);
  cylinder(h=3, r=2.5, center=true);
 }
}

Next time I’ll learn how to do for loops instead of copy/paste.