Customizable Brackets

Customizable Brackets

A collection of corner, flat angled, flat straight, and U-shaped brackets with configurable angles and hole patterns.

Used by my muffin fan holder and mini greenhouse projects (see pictures).

Updates

Version 2, nov-29-2023:

Add capability to specify corner-style brackets side lengths separately and u-shaped brackets base and arm lengths separately. Note this modification required changing the customizable brkts_bracket_length parameter from a scalar to a 2D array. Please update your brackets.json file accordingly.
Add capability to specify which sides of brackets have holes for mounting screws.
The brackets thing longer includes files from the BOSL2 library. BOSL2 can be downloaded from github (see below).

Notes

The top level OpenSCAD file is brackets.scad. This is the file you open when starting OpenSCAD or the file that you pass to OpenSCAD on the command line.
Alternatively, if you're having trouble opening brackets.scad, try opening the file called brackets-1f.scad. This is a flat file - all of the necessary files except the BOSL2 library files are concatenated into this single file.
The OpenSCAD files use the BOSL2 library, not included here, but can be downloaded from https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2. Be sure to add the path to your BOSL2 directory to OPENSCADPATH. For example, on Linux, do something like:

export OPENSCADPATH=$OPENSCADPATH:/mnt/share/openscad-contrib

Where the openscad-contrib subdirectory contains the BOSL2 hierarchy.

Customizable Parameter Notes

Bracket length (default = [60, 0]) - A 2D array which is [side1-len, side2-len] for corner brackets and [base-len, arms-len] for u-brackets. If brkts_bracket_length[1] is 0, then all bracket sides have length = brkts_bracket_length[0].

Interior angle (default = 90 degrees) - this is the corner bracket angle which is typically 90deg. A smaller angle opens the sides up relative to each other.

Bend angle (default = 0 degrees) - applies to the flat angled brackets only. Bends one side up or down from a flat surface. Can be used, for example, to join a flat piece and an angled piece on the top or bottom.

Mounting hole (shaft) diameter, head diameter, head height - default to the dimensions for an #6 wood screw.

Hole count (default = 2) - number of holes per side.

Holes out (default = false) - flips the beveled screw head cutout to the opposite side of the brackets.

Hole skew (default = 0) - skews adjacent holes relative to each other in the Y direction.

Drill sides (default = "all") - Which sides of bracket to drill holes. "all" = all sides, "s1" = corner brackets side1, "s2" = corner brackets side2, "base" = u-bracket base, "arms" = u-bracket vertical arms, and "none" = no holes.

Greenhouse Notes

The top angled part of the mini greenhouse is 3' wide and 1' tall in the back, so the angle in the front is atan(1/3) ~= 18.5 degrees, making the angle bracket internal angles 90 - 18.5 = 71.5 and 90 + 18.5 = 108.5 degrees.

See the upside down picture of the greenhouse frame to see how the brackets were used to support the frame.

The angled flat surface bracket was used as additional support on the front greenhouse sides. It's internal angle is 71.5 degrees.

Included STLs

I've only included the STLs that I used for the mini greenhouse project. For other configurations, you'll need to use the OpenSCAD customizer (see below)

Customizer Notes

The Thingiverse customizer does not work with this thing. The Thingiverse customizer seems to be stuck at [2015, 3, 0] (the last time I checked anyway) and this thing uses some of the more modern OpenSCAD features.

To customize, download all of the thing .scad files into a folder, download the BOSL2 library, then open brackets.scad with OpenSCAD. OpenSCAD is downloadable from openscad.org.

Licenses and Attributions

brackets.scad, et. al: LGPL v2

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