A friend of mine has a tent with a broken connector (the bit that connects the tent poles together, not sure of the technical term) and I offered to help fix it for him as spare parts for the tent are no longer available. Any advice?
It’s just a bent piece of metal tube. It’s not very big, and while I’m sure I could 3d-print a new part it’s probably not going to be very strong. Alternatively we could get some metal pipe and cut and bend it but I’ve not done any metalwork yet.
From his original message, it’s 10cm length, 1cm diameter, so pretty small. Angle looks like about a 30 degree bend. He said he’d get some more accurate measurements and he’s in West Norwood so I could bring the broken part and an identical working part into the makerspace.
Here are some pictures of what the part should look like and what it actually looks like (third picture is broken one)
That’s a pretty common size for tent poles. Go Outdoors have boxes of the things on sale, including with angled elbows like that. They’re usually epoxied in, so worst comes to worst you could dremel the damaged connector into quarters and peel it off the poles; use a pipe bender to make a new one out of some aluminium pipe; and glue it all together.
I don’t think we have pipe bender in space, which is best option. The angle is shallow and diameter is small so you may get away bending it by hand in a vice using a combination of torch and sand/spring inside. Also this probably would be strong enough even if it kinks a bit
