A hair-going-into-the-shower-drain-preventer of my very own.

     I am someone who has a lot of hair. Most of the time, it is a lot of long hair. It's good for a lot of things: keeping my head warm, looking good. But something that it absolutely excels at is clogging my shower drain. I try to be careful and catch as much of it as I can and put it away from the mouth of the drain. But I'm only human and enough gets through that I have to buy a snake cleaner from the hardware store and remove a hairball from the drain every few weeks. There are plenty of solutions for this problem on the market and I have tried a few with medium levels of success. But hey! I am an engineering student with a 3D printer, the world is my oyster, so I'm going to talk about my ongoing process to make the best darn hair-going-into-the-shower-drain-preventer that I possibly can! 

A twist and lift shower drain.

    Firstly, this is what my drain looks like. I do realize that it is possible to remove the middle to install a Tubshroom or something similar, but in all honesty, I just haven't been able to remove it. And with only a year left of living in this apartment, I'm trying not to break anything.

 

    For a while, I had printed a solution that I had found on Thingverse. (I would link it, but I don't see it there anymore). But it was a little too big for my drain, so it kinda worked, but not very well. 

    Enter: I bought some calipers. 

Nothing fancy, I think they were $14 on Amazon. But, they allowed me to measure my drain very precisely. So I gathered some dimensions and got to engineering!

I started by printing out a simple ring. (Shown below) I intended for this ring to fit on top of the part of the drain that does not lift up, which I will now be referring to as the outer ring. 

One ring to rule them all.

 

For the first iteration, I entered the measurements I took and made the ring precisely that size. This was dumb. (Look, I'm a software gal, not a mechanical engineer.)

It didn't fit because I needed to allow the ring a little bit of leeway to go past the inner ring. So, back to Tinkercad to adjust some more!

The second ring fit perfectly.

Too perfectly.

I was unable to get it off of the outer circle. I had to resort to those skinny tweezers that they include in computer repair kits. But, it accomplished what I wanted to do, which was to make a ring that fits over the outer ring. Now for the fun part: adding STUFF to the top. 

The stuff on the top needed to be enough of a maze to stop the hair from passing over, but also simple enough to be cleaned easily. I slapped together carefully and analytically designed this: 

hair-going-into-the-shower-drain-preventer

hair-going-into-the-shower-drain-preventer from the top

Now, a keen-eyed observer would notice the bottom of the first figure. The stuff has extended to the bottom of the hair catcher, would the hair just pass through?

You would be absolutely correct, but thanks to a cheap trick in Cura, we can prevent all of that from printing.

Behold: Shifting the print below the print bead such that Cura doesn't print that part! 

 The lumpy blue part in the figure above will not be printed!

So, I have a working hair-going-into-the-shower-drain-preventer of my very own.

But did it actually work?

The answer is YES-ish. It definitely catches most of the hair. I have been using it for 5 months now, and there is almost always proof surrounding the drain after my shower that it does work, I will spare the internet the indignity of looking at my hair and my drain. However, I have had to resort to a chemical plumber and drain snake at least once within the 5 months I've had it. So it works, but not perfectly.

But I think I can make it better!

Here is my plan: print it in TPU. 

Here is my thought process on why TPU would make a difference. 

Hair loves to stick to rubbery materials, I think that by printing the hair-going-into-the-shower-drain-preventer in TPU it will catch more hair.

It's a fussy material to print in because it is flexible and remains flexible after printing. So, there are a lot of printer settings that need to be adjusted. Additionally, this design as it is currently is unlikely to print well in TPU because of how thin the stuff is on top. 

So, to print in TPU I will need to make the stuff thicker. 

But before ANY of this fun adventure starts, I need to hone in my TPU settings. 

Which will lead to messing around with more print settings. 

Maybe it will be done before my final semester of school starts? 

For now, I am happy with the hair-going-into-the-shower-drain-preventer. Going from cleaning hairballs out of the drain every few weeks to every few months suits me just fine.