3D Printed Baby Gate Brackets

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This little project completely justified my purchase of a 3D Printer to my wife. We have a stairway leading to the basement in our house that has a wall on one side and a wooden post/ handrail on the other. Our son Samuel was starting to be very mobile so we knew we had to get a baby gate. Unfortunately, the one we purchased from Amazon wanted you to drill anchors into both walls (or in our case the wooden post) to install it. Sam will one day be able to navigate stairs by himself and I didn’t really feel like causing irreparable damage to the woodwork, so I needed a workaround. Amazon does sell some cheap-looking post clamp thingies but there was no way I was trusting my son’s life to those.

So I CADed up some brackets to fit the 3″ posts and printed them out at 75% infill with 2.8mm perimeters. It took 44 hours of total printing time (22 hours per bracket) but they are SOLID. The brackets were bolted toΒ  1/2″ red oak and lined with weather stripping to prevent marring. Each bracket is bolted down with all-thread using thread-locked nylock nuts (they are not going anywhere!) Now my son is safe, the wood is safe, and my wife realized that a 3d printer is not an expensive toy, it’s a tool that can make real, usable things.

STL file available here (of course, use at your own risk. Also – file is in inches)