Functional 3d printing

Last July I went camping as part of a big bicycle adventure. All went well except I found myself on the ground that night. My sleeping pad failed.

With the help of a fellow bicyclist I was able to figure out the valve area was leaking. That was the end of that sleeping pad, so I made do with the help of a walmart and a yoga mat for the rest of my trip.

I won’t call it ideal, but it saved my sleep!

Fast forward to today. I picked up a valve kit from Thermarest awhile back to try to fix my non-thremarest pad. Not knowing what was in store, the project sat on the back burner just waiting.

Today was the day. Pull out the old valve with the help of a pair of pliers and… no dice.

The new valve stem was too small to fit the hole of my off brand sleeping pad. I needed some way to adapt the too small valve stem into my sleeping pad.

Thankfully, I have a 3d printer. It’s a bit dusty and I won’t go into the fiddling I had to do just to get it back online and talking on my network. That part wasn’t fun.

Designing a quick adapter and printing it. That was fun. It’s so satisfyling to make something that works and solves a problem.

Well, at least I’ve solved the issue of fit. Whether this fixes my leaking sleeping pad, that has to wait a couple more hours for the glue to cure for me to find out.