A Better Soccer Goal with 3D Printing!

Hey, I'm Bob and I like to make stuff. I was working on a project recently with EMT Conduit. It's a very inexpensive material. It's made of steel. It's easy to work with. And in the process of coming up with this design, I actually found a way to make it way more useful. Let's talk about it. The original problem that I was actually trying to solve here was to make a better practice soccer goal. My kids all play soccer and we have these little foldable goals and they're terrible. They're like tents with a bunch of straps and stands and pieces that stick together and they're just really annoying to set up and to take down. So I was going to come up with a better solution using EMT Conduit. This is a really simple material. It's very inexpensive. It's easy to work with. So I thought this would be a great way to build a frame of a soccer goal that you could fold up flat and put on the wall. So I started getting some measurements of this stuff so that we could model some pieces to attach to it. The profile of the soccer goal is basically that. So I wanted to put a hinge here, a hinge here, and then a stake down here so that when you latch this together, stick it in the ground, it's good to go. Then, when you take it out of the ground, the whole thing can fold flat and you can hang it on a wall. And to do this, I had to go into Fusion 360 and start building some of these hinges and these spikes to work with the conduit. All right, anytime you're going to model something to fit something in the real world, you have to take as many measurements as possible. So the first thing I did was take some calipers and I got some thicknesses of the walls. I got the inside diameter. I got the outside diameter. I wrote all those things down because they're standard across this material pretty much. Then I put them into Fusion as parameters so that I could start to build a model using them. Then, if I decided I wanted to go with a different size pipe, all I have to do is change the parameters. So I got that sketch drawn out and then modeled kind of a post that would fit inside this. I printed this thing out a few times just to get the fit exactly right. I put a through hole in it so that I could put a bolt through the EMT and tie these two things together. And then I started building the specific things that I needed on top of it. First two things that I made were actually a spike to hold the whole thing down and a loop for that spike to go through. So this would be on the bottom, this would be on the top, and the two pieces would come together, lock it into the ground, as well as lock the whole frame into shape. So the next thing I needed was a hinge. In fact, I needed two of them. If you remember, there's a triangle. I need a hinge at the top and the back. So I modeled one that would work in both of those situations based on the same post that I was using for everything else. So I got a really simple hinged piece here. The bolt that goes through it is a quarter-twenty, which is super common. It's used in photography mounts and lots of other stuff. So that's easy. And once I had this thing, I realized that I could use this for all sorts of different joints. And I started realizing that I was actually building a system of objects that would all attach to EMT conduit that could be way more than a soccer goal. And then I was walking home and saw a different kind of soccer goal in somebody's yard and it gave me even a better idea than this one. In the second idea, we had the same kind of upright and ground piece, but there was a hinge right here on the front instead that had a spike built onto it. And then to keep those in that position, I just needed some sort of a gusset to run between them. And since I already had that base, I could make a different kind of connector to get this thing to stay in place. And this was the first iteration. It's not tight enough. It doesn't have enough surface area. So I moved on and tried a few different versions. I ended up on this one. This one has a little bit tighter fit and I printed it with 50% infill. So it's a lot of plastic and it snaps on. It's nice and tight. Now this piece can actually become the gusset. So if I put one of these fittings on each end, I can lock that to the upright and the ground position piece. Having this little system of pieces made me realize that we could actually use this same post and build anything we wanted on the end so that we could use conduit for all sorts of different projects. So with that in mind, I challenged some of the other people on the team to use this same idea, the same conduit, to come up with a project of their own that's entirely different, that doesn't have to do with the soccer goal. So while they're working on that, you and I are going to finish up the design work and the building for the goal and then we'll look at some other ideas for these projects. I love making projects that are interactive and engage with the world and the people around them and I want you to have that feeling as well. Over the years, we've made almost 500 videos showing you how to make all sorts of silly things and practical things and renovate your home and lots of other stuff. And a couple of years ago, we put out our first online course, Fusion 360 for Makers, and its purpose was to equip you even more to make the things that you want to have. I'm super excited to tell you about our brand new course, Arduino for Makers. In this course, I took my experience as a teacher, as a software engineer, and as a maker my entire life and came up with a path of study to help you be able to understand basic electronics, write some code, and put them on a microcontroller to act as the brain of your project. And this course is specifically made for people who have no idea what any of that stuff means. You don't have to have any experience with electronics or coding to get started. This is a great way to learn the basics and start to build a skill that could become a career or just help you make really awesome stuff. I've done my best to make all of this stuff accessible to everyone regardless of your experience. I tried to gather all the best resources out there and my own experience and organize it together in a way that's really easy to follow along with. You can learn this stuff and I want to help you. If you want to watch the first couple of videos and learn more about what the course has to offer, you can do all that for free at arduinoformakers.com. I hope you like it and I hope it helps. Go make something awesome. Over the weekend, I spent some more time modeling. So I found that I needed a hinge with a spike on it. So I took the spike off of this model. I took the hinge that I was working on, stuck them together and ended up with a super weird but very useful thing that will allow me to have hinged pipes that I can spike down into the ground. So stuff like this turns out to be really easy to do once you've got the basic pieces. Another thing I did was take the clip that I made before with the 45 degree angle on it and started adding other stuff to the outside of it. So I made a clip with a spike on it. So basically I've got all the pieces I need for this particular project. I've got them printed. So now we got to move on to working with the conduit. This stuff is really easy to work with and using this pipe bender will allow you to add a bend. There's angle markings on here to help you figure out what angle you need it to end up at. And really this is just kind of a brute force thing, but it's not that hard. So I took this one piece and bent it into what's going to be the part on the ground. The ones that go upright are going to be a little bit longer because it needs to be taller on the front. So Megan bent those for me and I intentionally made this section a little bit too long so that we can actually line these up, figure out how much difference there is here and then trim it off of these parts so that it's exactly the same width on the top and the bottom. And there's actually going to be a little bit of a gap in between these and that's because I got these connectors. Of course, I could 3D print something to join these together, but they already make these and they use set screws to hold them together. So you just slide them on, line up both pieces, drive in some screws and it'll hold together. And this is fine for joining conduit to itself. These are very inexpensive and it's going to be stronger than a 3D print. And cutting this stuff is really easy. A hacksaw will take a little bit of time, but it totally works. So you don't have to have any big metalworking tools, but if you do have a bandsaw, that makes it even faster. Now I need to put on these hinges. Now to do this, I have to have both of the pieces that go on here to have holes so that there could be bolts to go through the pipe and through the hinge to lock it all together. So I've been trying to figure out how to make sure that I'm drilling the holes through the pipe on the correct plane between the two sides. And I found not the simplest way to do it, but using a center finder, which this is a tool that I bought for a totally different purpose, but it works. And there's a lot of different ways to make center finders. You can make them out of scrap wood. So I'm not saying you have to have this tool, but it's what I have on hand. I'm going to use one of these holes that fits a pencil, and then I'm going to clamp it around the pipe. When you squeeze it down, it makes sure that this line with the pencil is at the center of whatever it's clamped around. So once I've got that, then I can drag it and make a mark on the pipe. So now I've got this line, which is centered between this surface and this surface. And I've got to measure off the end here and then that's my point where I can drill a hole. Then I do the same thing on the other side and my hinges should be parallel. It just dawned on me that a good thing to do for this system would be to 3D print some sort of a jig that I could put around this, and that would show me exactly where to drill the hole. Do that next time. I've got the two parts put together with the hinges. It actually took a little bit to get everything lined up, but I think it works out pretty well. And the hinge works really well. I've got some spikes sticking out of the bottom because right now it's laying face down. So once it's stood up, those spikes will go down into the dirt. So the last thing is to add the gusset pieces that run between these to lock it into position. I've got these ready. I just have to cut two equal pipes, slide these in, and it'll be done. So we got a replacement soccer net. It's way bigger than I need. So we can lay it across the frame and I'm going to use some zip ties to hold it in place. And that's probably not the best long-term solution, but it will definitely help figure out how big the net needs to be. Then we can trim off the excess and maybe figure out a different solution for attaching it, or maybe not. So we got the net all attached. I think it's actually going to work out really well for it folding down. But the last thing to add on are these clips to go on the back line with a spike on them so that when we set it up, we can drive in the front face and the back face into the ground, then stand the whole thing up and it should be good to go. This thing is ready to go try out in the yard. But before we do that, I want to show you a couple of other really cool ideas that the team came up with using this same system. I mean system in that they use the same dimensions and built some other really, really cool stuff. So Anthony made a light stand for holding a light when we're shooting video, and it uses an entirely different set of fittings. He made some feet for the pipes, and he made a knuckle so that you can actually adjust a boom arm, and it's all 3D printed. Megan even came up with a really cool little magazine holder to go next to your couch, and all we had to do was make some 90-degree fittings to put a bunch of pieces together, and it looks awesome. Okay, let's go try out the soccer goal. As a fold-up soccer goal, this thing totally worked. It's actually really stable. It's easy to set up and tear down. It hangs on the wall, does all the things that I wanted to do, and really it's just kind of a first draft. I can improve all of those pieces that I designed, and I can reprint them easily and make this thing even better going forward. The combination of conduit and 3D printing actually gave Anthony and Megan both unique ideas to them, and I hope it gave you some ideas as well. If it did, I would love to hear about them because I think this is just the beginning of what could be a really cool system of fittings and connectors. So that's it for this one. Thanks for watching. You're going to go to bloopers, and I'm going to go to a soccer game. Tiny bits of hot metal are just pouring down into my palm. Anthony, everybody! I hope it gave you some ideas that are unique to you. You, you, you, you. Thanks for watching. You got bloopers. You, what did you say? The end.