Baby gate adapter

The problem: attach a baby gate to a round, tapered post.

Products for sale are a mix of not quite right for my application and slightly expensive. I spent about 1 hour of research and deciding what to do, measuring things.

Solution: boot up OpenSCAD. Grab some heat set inserts and matching hardware from the makerspace collection. Make a messy quick script in about an hour. I will attach it to this post. Queue up two resulting parts in the printer. The bigger piece takes about 45 min to print. The heat set inserts (4 of them) take minutes to put in.

First revision: diameter too small, and the part pictured above was too long.

Second revision: took maybe the better part of an hour to dig through and rework my increasingly messy code, but the new print seemed perfect, except until I installed it and noticed the sharp corner was going to be at eye height soon for the toddler.

Third revision: rounded corners. Took longer than I wanted it to. Looks just like above assembly but rounded on this part.

Here is the script, but it is a mess.

I was in a rush and it started getting very "spaghetti code" and I didn't have the patience to "throw the first one away." Also OpenSCAD is not the best tool for rounded corners/chamfers/fillets but I am still a little slow with Fusion 360.

Reflection: if the products sold online were of quality and worked well for my application it would have been worth buying it instead of designing it, if accounting for my time (which is feeling stretched quite thin nowadays). But doing it yourself wins as usual on the following fronts: getting exactly what you need because you can customize as you like, learning and practicing skills, the joy of doing it yourself.