2020-03-16 (M) Electro Knife for Simulated Combat EleKSCo

My local surplus shop had some disposable grounding straps, which turned out to be conductive plastic, probably Velostat, on tape. I cut out a little chunk and wrapped it around the knife blade, so it touched both side electrodes. This way, if I activated the knife by accident, the electricity should flow through it instead of me. I wrote the word, "Safety" on the exposed side.
Safety measure

All the people who saw the square handle had issues with how it might feel, its size, and the safety of right-angles. The shape came from when we decided on a square voltage converter, but if we wanted a thinner handle, we would have to reconsider using slender round units. The problem with this is going to be attaching a switch to a rounded surface, which I found when making laser tag equipment.
Switch and pipe dimensions

Like the laser tag stuff, I set about making an adapter that would interface a chassis-mount switch to a round tube. In OpenSCAD, I made a model, and it was so small that it took my printer longer to warm up than perform the print. I quickly found that it was a pain to tighten a round plastic piece to a round switch because there were no corners to gain purchase. I changed the model to print a hexagon instead of a cylinder, which was still a cylinder but rendered with six faces.
Switch adapter model iterations

The prints wrapped neatly around the tube I measured, which was 1" EMT electrical pipe. I think they may have been a little on the small side since my printer likes to print everything at a 5% reduction from the model. The picture shows an early cylindrical print.
Switch adapter on some pipe

Once I printed a hexagonal adapter at 105%, I could fit the switch and tighten it down using the threads to bite into the plastic and hold itself tightly. There shouldn't be any way to loosen the switch from the outside.
Switch adapter

GitHub repo for EleKSco.
The rest of the posts for this project have been arranged by date.
First time here?
Completed projects from year 1
Completed projects from year 2
Completed projects from year 3
Completed projects from year 4
Completed projects from year 5
Completed projects from year 6

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2020-03-02

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