This has been through many days of iterations and designs. Most involved over center mechanisms or wheel levers before this design dawned on me. The bottom right is how it prints. The “spring” is a double forked 10mm bridge in the last few millimeters inside the enclosed print. The visible “clamp” is connected to the spring by forking into two paths that branch beside the tube that the spade terminal is inserted through. The clamping force is not great but it is sufficient for a reliable basic electrical connection for bench testing. The pictured driver is a very small tweeter and is barely held in place with both wires inserted between the print and spade terminal.

I wanted something that would fit on the faceplate of the little hacked audio amp enclosure I have been designing. I think 6 of these will barely fit across the front and under the actual circuit board assembly.

This one might be worth the hassle of setting up an account and sharing on printables if it does not require the goggle server connection like it did in the past when I tried.

The thing is, I dial in my prints to 0.3mm clearances and this absolutely requires that clearance. I do not care to print other people’s designs because most are really terrible for things like supports, designing for 3d printing, clearances, and general slop. I’ll occasionally toss someone else’s STEP or STL in FreeCAD and rebuild the thing but I usually just use some conceptual idea of anything I see elsewhere. I think with this one, I could share it as a negative Boolean STEP file to be most useful. Then it would only require others to import and do a boolean cut operation to use the design. Maybe I will do so if it works out well in my enclosure with 6 of these all resolving well and functional. What do you think, would you ever care to find and print something like this in one of your designs? Do you think anyone would even understand the value of printing such fundamental componentry instead of buying hardware and gluing it together with a 3d printed design? Like, this could easily be configured to use a loop of solid core copper wire as the connector terminal for a low voltage bench power supply that requires no other hardware.

Also, I had a rather irritating encounter with Dessalines (the Lemmy Dev) on ML a few days ago. I want to move off of Lemmy but I kinda like the rest of you, so maybe piefed is an option. I haven’t looked into it deeply as I thought rust was worth supporting more, however empowering these guys as authoritarians is not on my list. I’m in a position to move this community if people want but like I always say, I’m just the janitor here. I do not matter. I would just as soon give this place to someone else if that is best for the community. I only want what is best for all, which is probably stability first and foremost, but if you feel otherwise, maybe mention it, maybe we’ll make it happen.