Garden Hook
What if you live in an apartment with little floorspace but want to garden? I created a hook that utilizes the balcony - a feature present in many apartments - by hanging gardening pots off of it.
Timeframe : Jul 14th - Jul 21st Role : Designer Skills : sketching & model making
My process
My first idea was a zig zag shaped hook that would have a "spike" on the top and the bottom. The top spike would grip onto the balcony railing and the bottom spike would grip the pot.
The side view of my new design
I used a chair to simulate a balcony railing because at the time I was on vacation.
I decided to create a prototype out of carboard to test my idea. I quickly realized it didn't work because the "spike" at the top didn't latch onto the balcony railing properly, and the one at the bottom was unable to hold the weight of the pot.
I redesigned and came up with the design on the left side. I changed the top so it would stay firmly in place on the balcony railing. To hold the pot tightly, I brought the vertical center piece of the hook closer to the part at the bottom, which allowed the lip of the pot had to have just enough room to fit in the gap but not move around. This ensured that the hook held the pot in place firmly.
I created a new sketch based on the prototype and used it to model the hook in Fusion 360.
Unfortuantely, I ran into another issue - the 3d printer I was going to use to print my model had a maximum size requirement, and my model exceeded that significantly. I had to reduce the size of my model which ended up altering the appearance of the hook more than I thought it would.
The new model in Fusion 360
Here you can see the size difference between the sketch and the shorter model I had to make.
Renders
In Use
