Now that spring is just around the corner it's time to get the sprinkler system back up and running, and every year I have to replace a broken head or two and it can get a little expensive, since I have the capabilities to just make one at home I thought I would give it a try.
The first thing I did was design a pattern in Inkscape that I can use with rotate extrude and make all of the components fit together:
I put the parts on different layers so I could import the layers separately and export the individual pieces as an stl, in the picture above I have the main body, cap, spray nozzle and center pop up. I adjusted everything so there was a bit of clearance so i could add threads and the center stem would slide up and down when pressure was applied.
I used my thread module to make custom threads for everything, since the sprinkler is not a standard size I needed to customize the threads for it. The threads for the nipple that screws into the existing piping is a standard size though, so I made a cutoff nipple with the tube module and the thread module that I can use for that.
The 360 degree spray head:
Here's the whole thing with the transparency set so I could see the clearances of the different parts:
Everything printed well but I am going to make some changes because I think i will have some leaks and I can simplify the design a bunch, but it was really easy to make this and it will be really easy to make changes. I will post a video of it in action as soon as I start watering.
