3D Printed Climbing Holds pt. 1
I wanted some kind of finger strength training device for my attic for a while. I could just buy a hangboard or some holds to bolt onto the wall, but where's the fun in that?
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
I have a 3D Printer so why not just 3D print them? They're just lumps of plastic after all. Turns out somebody already tried, and the method seemed easy enough to try myself.
Bryan Cockfield
The process boils down to printing the hold, coating it in PE resin and sprinkling salt on top of it all. After the resin is cured the salt is dissolved away and you're left with a nice texture on the hold.
Making a mess
The printing went smoothly and my 0.6 mm CHT nozzle made quick work of the chonky plastic part. For material I chose 3DJakes ecoPLA, because it seemed to be a bit less brittle than standard PLA and still melted fast enough to print with reasonable speed at 0.48 mm layer height.
The problems started when I tried to coat the prints in epoxy (yes, normally PU or PE resins are used for holds, but epoxy was what I had). It just was too runny and after adding salt, it seemed like it was getting soaked up by the salt layer. After curing it turned out that the epoxy had coated most of the salt particles and couldn't be dissolved with water. Still, the texture of the hold feels kinda nice and I want to try it out before eventually coating it again with thickened epoxy.
