A handful of hats
I recently 3D-printed some hands to hold hats, scarfs and other things in my hallway. This goes quite well with the printed noses holding my sunglasses.
What my hallway is missing
A couple of months ago I noticed a problem in my hallway: it is quite a small room and there is not really a good spot to store hats, scarfs, handbags and similar things. Where can they go? Well there is some space on the wall underneath the cool nose shaped glass holders “Sir Neigel” I printed a couple years ago.
I though having already heads on that wall the only logical next step could be to add some hands to hold the things for me. The have to be roughly the same size as human hands and be wall mountable.
A 3D hand
Now all I needed was a model of a hand. While printing my own hand might have been cool I decided that it is too much work to play around with scanning software. Instead I was off to the online 3d model libraries and quickly found a nice model on printables: this towel holder in the form of a hand.
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Deburring tool
White PLA filament
Prusa mini printer
It looks good enough, seems big enough to hold some things and even already has included mounting slots. Perfect! Now lets print it.
Printing a hand
I printed the hand from white Prusament PLA using a normal 100% scaling. I decided to print it laying down with some tree supports. This requires some work afterwards to remove the supports but a deburring tool works well. I would definitely recommend to keep the supports on the outside though. That part will be less visible later and is easier to reach.
I later printed a second one standing up as well. This works too but if it gets too high your printer might get less precise and you need to pay more attention to bed adhesion.
Mounting
Finally it was time to mount the hands to the wall (sounds strange…). I first tried it with some puddy but unfortunately that barely holds the hand itself and I really want to be able to put some weight on it as well. So instead it was time to drill some holes into the wall, put some wall ankers in and use screws.
The hand itself already has some mounting slots that can slip right on top of the screws. Some adjustment of the screws helps to find a position where they are just far enough in that you can still push the hand on them but not enough for the hand to wobble.
The final result – hands on the wall
Here we go: I am quite happy. It is a funny idea that delights me every time I see it and works quite well so far to hold everything from a hat to a dog leash. You can simply hang things on top but with the natural division between the fingers you can also just slot things in. Overall it looks quite funny. The colors are less different in reality by the way although it would still have been nice to use the same filament.
