Re claiming the earth! Up cycling those wasteful water ballon fillers.

Ever see those one time use rapid water balloon fillers like below?

I hate them. Gone are the days of meticulous hand loading a water balloon. There was always a bit of uncertainty. Will the balloon explode on me? How much do I fill it? And if I did manage to fill it beyond a massive capacity-could I tie it off?

Alas, when I saw this throw away monstrosity of plastic, I immediately thought I could do something with this. How about making a cool vacuum attachment with it.

And so it began. I knew the most complex part would be the threads to screw into the filler. Fortunately, Fusion 360 has its own thread maker function. Score! Of course, it wasn't that easy. There are over 15 thread standards. . .

Yikes! So many!

Unfortunately the standard 3/4 garden hose thread with 11.5 threads per inch wasn't explicitly listed. So I had to measure, hack and figure it out. And then I printed my first thread.

Surprised at how well it printed the first time without supports, I then screwed it onto the balloon filler. And screwed. And screwed. Screw this. . .  It seems that I didn't print the entry ramp into the threads. So I hacked and filed one in and it fit brilliantly. After realizing I didn't set the "modeled" check box on the thread builder in Fusion 360, the next model worked. I quickly attached the thread to an adapter to our vacuum and hit print.

Looks pretty good right? Well, in my haste I forgot about the 90 degree over hang I created inside the cylinder.

Look at that beautiful transition to hold the threads. The threads were hanging on by . . . threads.

Overhang hell. So I changed the design where I gave a gradual transition. Note to the Fusion 360 crowd, I was trying to loft the screw thread to the top part of the cylinder and it wouldn't merge the shapes. I had to revolve a profile to make this work. 

I also used the multi variable layer. .2 mm height on the cylinder body and finer resolution for the threads.

And look on the inside.

Assembled

The threads fit much better with the ramp cut into the chamfer. 

From the demo above, this thing actually works.  The resistance it creates with the vacuum however is really high. I wouldn't use this for normal day to day cleaning. 

Until next time, thanks for reading along!