Must… stop… brain…

I can’t help it.  Another idea using the last mouse funnel occurred to me.

What if you had a long tube with a series of bristles all pointing in the same direction just like the mouse funnel?  Put some peanut butter on the outside, install in a door, and walk away happy and content that you’re saving mouse lives.

Once the mouse started down that tube it wouldn’t be able to turn around or back up easily.  Given the option of unlimited freedom outdoors and chewing its way back through pokey bits, I can’t imagine it would choose plastic splinters.

Self-emptying mouse funnel mousetrap

I’ve spent WAAAAY too much time thinking about this problem.  Here’s my new idea:

The hope is that a mouse inside your house will walk out the hole in the door to get to the peanut butter on the other side of the funnel.  Once inside the box with all of the peanut butter consumed the mouse can either (a) try to struggle past the pointy bits back into the house or (b) slip outside through the second funnel.

Mouse funnel mousetrap

Peanut Butter Jar Mousetrap v2.0
Mouse funnel mousetrap

After thinking a bit more about my design for a Peanut Butter Jar Mousetrap, I decided it could be even more minimal/adaptable.

This new mouse funnel mousetrap design requires four bolts, four nuts, and some kind of container with a 4cm hole in it.

Peanut butter is still a really good idea.

Peanut Butter Mousetrap design notes

I treat this blog as part of my lab notebook on printing and designs to help keep me organized.  Having it automatically add tags, adding a time stamp, organizing everything in chronological order, and then making it available for others to learn and comment back are all just a huge bonuses.

Anyhow, here are some of my design notes for this Peanut Butter Mousetrap Insert:

  1. I was going for a minimal design – minimal plastic, printing, and machine time.
  2. I wanted something that would be “ABS warp” resistant.  Even if you end up with a warped flat surface, clamping the insert between the lid and the jar should even it out.
  3. I wanted a resilient design.  Even if the insert is badly warped after clamping down, a flat surface is not critical to its function and it should still work.
  4. I wanted something that could be adapted easily.  I don’t know how to use OpenSCAD, so a parametric design is kinda out the window.  Even so you could print this object at full size and then cut it down to what you need.  1
  1. For the record, I did download OpenSCAD before designing this.  I just wanted to get it out there. [↩]

Cheater cheater pumpkin eater

Some might consider it cheating to enter a mouse trap that is probably 95% not printed in the Mouse Get! challenge.  I disagree.

If your mouse trap requires anykind of bait/lure, then it’s not really 100% printed, is it? And, if it is 100% printed chances are a mouse isn’t going to be that interested.  My point is that once you deviate from a 100% printed mouse trap, we’re just quibbling about percentages. 1

Some use cheese to trap mice.  I’ve found peanut butter to be far more effective.  To extend the above thought further, if you’re using peanut butter (or cheese) – just how much can you use in the trap?  If you’re using a lot of peanut butter, why not the whole jar’s worth?  If you’re using an entire jar of peanut butter, why waste the jar itself?  Chances are you were going to throw the empty peanut butter jar away anyhow.

This isn’t so much cheating as it is…  recycling/repurposing. 2

  1. There’s an old joke attributed to both George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill that is rather on point… [↩]
  2. This brings to mind slippery slope arguments and the “If you give a mouse a cookie” book. [↩]

Peanut Butter Jar Mousetrap Insert

Peanut Butter Jar Mousetrap Insert
Peanut Butter Jar Mousetrap Insert

Here’s my entry in the Mouse Get! Challenge from Cathal Garvey.  I call it the “Peanut Butter Jar Mousetrap Insert.”

The idea is pretty simple.  Mice probably like peanut butter enough to squeeze into a small opening for a chance to eat it.  If the opening is difficult to wedge back open they might not be able to get back out.

So, buy a jar of peanut butter, eat most of it, leave some peanut butter at the bottom, cut out most of the top from the lid, print the “Peanut Butter Jar Mousetrap Insert“, put the insert with the pointy bits going inside, close the lid, prop it up somewhere so it doesn’t roll away, and wait for your peanut butter covered mouse!

Who needs lasercut acrylic when you have a MakerBot?

Printable extruder and now printable dinos!  I had tried my hand at printable dinos, but I’m not in Zaggo’s league.  While my designs were for printable dinos that could be as a single piece each, his are clearly more elegant and use much less plastic.

What’s interesting about the differences between our designs is that mine were based on trying to replicate the existing dinos in a printable manner.  However, the dinos themselves were designed based upon the constraints of having to design three dimensional parts by layering and fitting lasercut acrylic pieces.  The question I completely failed to answer, and which Zaggo addressed perfectly, is “How would you redesign this object if you only had to be concerned with the constraints of a MakerBot, not a laser cutter?”

If you aren’t constrained by having to assemble lasercut parts, why not print them in such a way that it uses less plastic?  Why not print them on their sides?  Even with a non-heated platform it should be trivial to get the bottom of these dinos flat.  If anything warps it will be the parts that hold up the extruder.  And even then the warp would only serve to keep a tight fit on the extruder by squeezing it together.

If you examine a plastruder you can see the filament and heater assembly are not perfectly centered within the unit.  My guess is that’s  why there are two dinos – one which reaches towards the center.  However, there’s no reason a printruder couldn’t be designed so that the heater assembly was in the middle of the printruder.  If this were the case you could just print up two sets of printable dinos – instead of a left/right or big/weird combo.  Zaggo’s design allows for supporting either a printruder or a layered lasercut acrylic plastruder.

And we’re one step closer to a printable MakerBot!