I recently came up with an idea for creating book ends. There are so many designs out there already but I was most interested in exploring the ones that have a metal “tongue” embedded into them. I posed the question “Could I create this style of design with a single 3d printed part?” If so, I could simply 3d print a book end and then cut out a bit of sheet metal for the “tongue”.
If the tongue is bent into an ‘L’ shape it can be easily inserted into the 3d printed housing.
After figuring out the tolerances and coming up with different examples, this would be a reasonably easy design to reproduce and it would be more sturdy than a 3D printed book end would be on its own.
The first design I created was a Roman Pillar:
A cross section view of the pillar shows the ‘L’ shaped tongue:
