Repair Glass Table Foot With Your 3D-Printer

One day, our glass table foot was broken.

My wife thought about to get a new one, but we both loved our old stable table, so I decided to try a repair.

It was a very heavy table with about 90 pound, so I had to think about it, how it will be fixed and secure attached.

Luckly it was only the soldered connection from plate to foot which was broken.

You will need:

1 x M8 nut

1 x M8 rod (60 mm, in case the rod in the table is to short)

4 x M3 cylinder or normal bolts

It's important to take the exakt measure even with 10th millimeters on the inside of the foot. - My foot inside was 43.3 mm and got an M8 rod.

For 3D construction I used 123D Design, because it's free.

For the outlines of the 43.3 mm x 25 mm hight cylinder I added four circle sketches with 0.5 mm outlines on four sides of the cylinder and extruded it to 25 mm cylinder hight.

To insert the M8 rod, I builded a cylinder, with 82 mm and 25 mm high. - Then I've imported a metric M8 nut stl-model and resized it to 1.02, before I aligned it with my cylinder and gave it some hight.

After this I aligned the big form with the M8 rod form and subtracted it.

Ready to export the new file to an stl.

Printing ist easy, but in this case you should better have a look to it.

As soon as your M8 hole is near as hight as an M8 nut, just hit the "pause"-button on your printer program.

Now insert your real M8 nut into the hole and hit the "resume"-button on your printer program to finish your print.

The last picture shows the form upside down.

The idea is clear. - We have a heavy table and the foot of the table should not pull out again.

So I used 4 x M3 screws and drilled four 3.1 mm holes into my table foot.

To get the same high, I used a plastic tape for easy, fast targeting.

Now it's the right time to hammer my printed out model into the table foot.

Fine adjustment on the right depth can be done with a vise.

Hint: Cut another M8 screw with an iron-saw right to the half, like shown in my picture above to save your rod from being damaged in the vise and hold it tight like a grizzly bear.

Before inserting my M3 bolts, I drilled inside all four holes with a 2 mm drill to needed depth.

Hint: To insert the bolts, use an electric screwdriver in fast mode, because it will heat up your bolt and this will make a real tight connection to the PLA or ABS.

win-win situation, thanks to 3d-print

We saved about 300 bucks, saved the nature (no trash) and got a nice stable table again.

Note to myself: Carpet should be changed asap ;)