Evolution of Design and the Mike Tyson rule

Ever heard of the Mike Tyson rule? "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". This rule can be applied to a lot of things-even design.

Problem: I recently pulled three ethernet cables to wire my front living room so I could have secured high speed LAN access without upgrading my wireless router. When securing the cables, I had a limited number of cable clips. So I did the best I could and let most of the wires dangle in the basement.

Solution: With my 3D printer-why not print my own cable clips? I could even customize it to the specific sizes of the two cat 6 and one cat 5e cables. Awesome!

Design and Print:  Drawing the design was relatively simple. It was drawing three profile of the three ethernet cables cutting out a rectangular body.  The first design produced this:

Straightforward and practical.  It felt bomb proof but it took 25 minutes to print. Not exactly the most efficient part to replicate 8 to 10 times.  So I went ahead and optimized the design.

I thought printing from this position would result in the strongest print.

As I started trimming some stuff down, I realized I had the print orientation wrong. As opposed to printing the parts as shown in the above, I should rotate it on its side. This would be the equivalent of taking a flat bar and bending three U-shape hoops in it.  When the printer can run the filament along the entire profile, this results in a very strong configuration.  So I flipped the print on its side and produced the ultimate design for strength and speed of creation! This 'final' design printed three times faster!

This is how it would print on the 3d printer.

With the ultimate design, the next logical course of action was mass production. Note to self: This is not the next step in design. One should test the design before mass production. . . . It was easy to copy and paste using the Slic3r software and off we went.

Mass production in the works . . . unfortunately.

Installation: Here comes Mike Tyson. I went ahead and tried to nail the cable tie and immediately encountered a problem. Nailing my cable tie upside down was very difficult. The angle and positioning I had to hold the hammer, I struck the cable tie. Repeatedly. To the point that it broke.

This did not survive the Mike Tyson rule.

Not only was the angle awkward, but the design required that I put the nail head past the humps. This required precision hammering. Precision hammering upside down was impossible-unless I spent 10 minutes micro tapping the nail. The nail setter I had would make hammering to tight. So I stopped  hammering the nails flush with the clip and just bent them once they were secured. It was a hack-but I resigned myself to just getting this done.

Did it look pretty? Nope. Did it satisfy my sense of awesome execution? Nope. Did I get the job done? Yep. And sometimes getting something done is what counts.

Original cable ties.

Painfully hammered flush nails. This took too long to get it right.

Bent nails! The hack way of getting it done!

Conclusion:  Next time-before I mass produce a design is to run it by the Mike Tyson rule. Despite your best efforts at what you think is perfection, make sure you test in a live environment or with a real customer!

Until next time. Happy Printing!

Iterate and test often!