Captain America Ball Chair Project Part Nine

This week I have been continuing my work on the construction of the Captain America ball chair project that I've posted about over the previous weeks.  I did not see any point in posting about all the sanding and prep work that I have managed to accomplish so far on various parts as this is pretty boring to post about week after week.  So with this post I wanted to show you the parts I have designed and have been 3D printing for the mounts that will be needed for the interior wedge pieces for the chair.

 

 This is a good image that I created showing the interior of the ball chair.  There are six wedge shaped pieces that will make up the interior of the chair and they will all be mounted in exactly the same way so it makes it a little simpler in some ways to get this part of the build accomplished.

Here is a good computer image of one of the wedge shaped inner pieces for the chair.  The wedges will be made from a mold that I am still constructing and will be made of fiberglass.  The spool shaped part just above the wedge in the image is one of the mounting assemblies that will be used in each corner of the interior wedge pieces.

 

Above is a breakdown of all the components that make up the corner mounts. The lower (red) piece is the base of the mount that will be bonded to the inner face of the ball chair.  The next part up from that is a threaded rod connector.  It is 1/4-20 in size and 7/8ths of an inch long which is a standard part that can be found at most hardware stores.  The (blue) top part of the assembly has an opening in the center cylindrical section of the part that the connector slides into.  When this is done the top and bottom parts are bonded together to encase the connector into the assembly.  The button head cap screw is then used to mount the wedge part to the mount to hold it in place within the chair at the corners.  The blue and red parts are designed so that I can 3D print them for each assembly.

 

 Here is a good image of the mounting assembly once it has been completely assembled.  The connector for the assembly is shown in the image above in light blue at the center of the assembly.

Once all of the connectors have been 3D printed three mounts will be assembled and mounted to the back sides of each of the six wedge sections.  This will make a strong simple mounting system that will be easy enough to 3D print.  The only downside to the design which cannot be improved upon is that it takes 100 minutes to print each mounting assembly.  For the chair I will need 18 mounting assemblies in total.  That adds up to 30 hours of 3D printing time. So I will be in my workroom for the next week or so just making these parts up so that they will be ready when the time comes to do the final assembly of the chair.  

Here's what the mounting assembly looks like taken apart and put together.  Assembled it is 2" tall and 1 1/2" in diameter.  Looks like a spool for a sewing machine but just larger.  It is very strong and should do the job nicely once I get all of the assemblies printed for the chair. 

  So that's about it for this week.  Just a bit more interesting than showing you pictures of me sanding parts for hours and hours and hours.  I'll keep you up to date on my progress and anything else new that I can show you that I've been working on here at the shop. Have a good one!