February 20, 2022
It's a gas gas gas
Just a quick 3D printing note.
A friend of mine upgraded her generator to a dual-fuel model, and needed a home for her previous one. I graciously volunteered to take the poor thing in. 10 years old, barely used. But it has a 4 gallon tank and my lawn-mower sized gas storage capability was dwarfed by it.
So one visit to the Mart of Walls later, I had a 5 Gallon gas can with some Rube Goldberg rejected monstrosity of a nozzle on it. ("Flip up the dark green paddle and hold it with your palm against the light green plunger, wrap your fingers on the top of the nozzle and squeeze against the powerful return spring, and wrestle the thirty pounds of gasoline with your other hand, and note that this is an inflexible spout that will not allow you to fill a car's gas tank, and will probably douse your mower entirely. There is also an internal restrictor that will cause gas to flow out if you try to fill the can too fast. All of these features are designed to make you give up and buy an electric mower. The spilled gas will release far more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere than the unusability features will supposedly prevent.")
So one visit to the Mart of Walls later, I had a 5 Gallon gas can with some Rube Goldberg rejected monstrosity of a nozzle on it. ("Flip up the dark green paddle and hold it with your palm against the light green plunger, wrap your fingers on the top of the nozzle and squeeze against the powerful return spring, and wrestle the thirty pounds of gasoline with your other hand, and note that this is an inflexible spout that will not allow you to fill a car's gas tank, and will probably douse your mower entirely. There is also an internal restrictor that will cause gas to flow out if you try to fill the can too fast. All of these features are designed to make you give up and buy an electric mower. The spilled gas will release far more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere than the unusability features will supposedly prevent.")
Thingiverse to the rescue. I found a nice plain cap. And another one with a convenient little spout to which you can easily attach some vinyl tubing to (with a nifty plug to stuff into the end of the tube when you're done). Amazon provided some vent fittings - basically all metal Schrader valve housings with no valve, but a nice cap - which arrived in two days even without Prime. I also found a replacement cap design that fit the shattered vent cap on my ancient can that was actually usable (as it predated the government fucking up gas cans and had a gooseneck nozzle and a separate vent.) I printed them all over the course of a day from PETG and I am quite satisfied.
Other than the fact that I had to buy 10 feet of tubing for $25 when I needed less than two, and that was more than the cost of the can....
Posted by: Mauser at
04:41 AM
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