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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1
I simply bought fairly normal Jerry cans at Amazon.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 23, 2022 10:32 PM (LZ7Bg)
2
Well, when you have a 3D printer, you look for excuses....
Also, those steel cans are pretty expensive.
Also, those steel cans are pretty expensive.
Posted by: Mauser at February 25, 2022 09:28 PM (Ix1l6)
3
And this weekend I tried TPU for the first time, and it wasn't as bad as everyone said it would be on a nearly stock Ender 3. I made some gaskets to go into the mouth of the can in case I damaged the lip, because I was getting some small leakage from the nozzle and the cap. I also scored some rubberized cork sheeting which I lined the cap with. That all stopped the leakage.
Posted by: Mauser at March 07, 2022 05:01 AM (gVjvf)
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