Kids Training Wheel Stands

My son decided to bring his bike inside for the winter and had a really cool idea to be able to keep pedaling even when watching TV. He set his training wheels inside of some shoes to lift it off the ground enough to pedal. The only problem with this really great idea was that the only shoes the training wheels would fit in and be lifted high enough off the ground were my favorite pair of shoes. So with his help I designed and printed some stands to go under his training wheels.

Supplies

Tinkercad Account

Access to a 3d printer

Bike with training wheels

Step 1: Design

I chose to use Tinkercad for this project as it is a super simple program to understand and my project wasn't going to be very complex.

I started by measuring and designing the training wheel. Once the wheel was laid out I took and sliced of the majority of the wheel, this leftover peice is going to become the groove the wheel will sit in. I then changed the sliver of the wheel into a hole and drew up a cube to be the base of my model. One thing I had to make sure when I added the cube was that it would be large enough to provide stability to the bike. I also didn't like having sharp corners on my cube so I adjusted the radius to bevel the edge slightly.

Step 2: Print

I currently have a .8mm nozzle on my ender 3 so printing time was reduced significantly. If you are going to do a lot of larger prints I would recommend picking up some larger nozzles as it makes printing so much quicker. I went ahead and just printed this in some extra PLA I had sitting out and it printed fairly well. As for print settings, I went with 20% infill, with the larger nozzle I bump my temperature up to 230 to help heat the large amount of plastic that is being forced through the extruder. My speed was initially set to 60mm/s but that seemed too fast so I changed my speed on the printer to 75%. I did have a pretty massive layer shift in one of the prints, I am not sure what caused it, I think it was from printing too fast.

Step 3: Enjoy

This simple project only took a few minutes to design and print, but it means I get my shoes back! The lifts work great and my sons will be able to ride the bike indoors all through the winter.

If you don't know how to use CAD programs, Tinkercad is a great place to start. It is all about putting simple shapes together to make more complex objects. In case you don't want to do that though I did upload this to thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4668365.