The Problem: Kitchen chairs!

Our kitchen chairs were what my Granny would have called, catywompus!  The plastic feet inserts broke over the years , but when we thought we would just add new ones, we discovered they were custom to the chair.   After much searching online, I found a whole lot of nothing.  I decided to save myself the hassle and hand Jamie a chair foot so that he could draw up a design in Tinkercad!  A couple of days later he handed me back a 3D printed chair foot, very similar to the one I originally gave him!

It snapped in easy peasy!   Jamie printed off enough for the rest of the chairs and ten minutes of install later our chairs were no longer ‘catywompus’.   Easiest home improvement/fix up ever!!  I am slowly discovering that having a 3D printer comes in quite handy for around the house stuff and making parts that you may otherwise have to have custom-made.   That, and it’s just a lot of fun!!

How To:
For this project Jamie used a Lulzbot Mini 3D Printer and black ABS filament.  At first we considered using a flexible filament called Ninja Flex, but decided against it.  I was concerned that with it being flexible and sort of ‘grabby’ for lack of a better description, that it would be difficult to move across the hardwood floors.  The ABS is a tough and smoother filament and moved easily on the floor, although in the end I’m not sure if that mattered because I put furniture sliders on top of the chair feet.

If you have broken things around your house or little broken parts that are difficult to come by, you may  be able to design a replacement yourself and 3D print it, just as we did these chair feet.