Snap hair clip

Let me introduce 3D printable snap hair clip.

The old familiar bistable compliant mechanism that is open in one shape and holds the hair in the closed shape.

The metal hair clips are made from flat sheet metal so I thought it should be 3D printable from plastic as well. After about nine iterations I got to a satisfactory end.

Materials:

I found out very quickly that our good old PLA is not at all suitable for this purpose because it creeps a lot, as it is not able to maintain bended shape (neither open nor closed).

PETG is a much better choice , even though it loses the bistable property In a few hours, but it is still able to do the trick in your hair. Just store them in the closed shape.

I'm sure there are even better materials that don't creep, such as PC blend, but I haven't tried that.

Printing:

There are no special requirements for 3D printing since this is small model that will be printed almost solid anyway.

Tolerances:

Please keep in mind that the pin and the hole are sensitive to printer settings, especially on extrusion of your printer. If you struggle to clip the pin in the hole or the connection is too lose, try to use XY compensation parameter to make it work. I would choose very small steps e.g. 0,02mm. Or try filing the hole a bit with a needle file.

Ornaments:

You can put various ornaments on the end of the clip using bayonet mount. Some ornaments are already prepared for you in the files, such as star, heart, cloverleaf, diamond, flower and smiley faces. You can print them with PLA. Try to play with color-change. For emample the smiley faces are color-change dependent.

But you can make your own ornament if you subtract the “bayonet_mount_neg_volume” (included in the files). Just set the bayonet mount volume as negative volume in the slicer.