Ozark Trail 10x20 Canopy Truss Bracket

We purchased an Ozark Trail Canopy on Walmart.com on clearance to use for a booth my daughter started, raising funds with handmade crafts for cancer research at our local Apple Festival. Normally Priced at $250 it was marked down to $99.00 so we could not pass up the price.I mean it came with all the side panels and everything.

To our dismay when we fist set it up two of the truss support brackets broke. They are just made out of cheap aluminum and it appears they break very easy.

I debated about returning the canopy and ordering a new one but then I thought that this would be a great use of the 3d printer. Using the printer would not only save me time and trouble of sending it back, ordering another one, waiting on it to arrive etc., but then a perfectly good canopy would not end up in a landfill somewhere because of two broken parts.

So I jumped into fusion. and started making it.

3d Printer,

Fusion 360

ABS printer filament.

This really is not that difficult of a bracket to design, but it needed to be a 1 to 1 fit and to beef up the corner area so it wouldn't break again. I have been playing around with 3d scanning but I cant get it right just yet. So I pulled out the calipers and started measuring.

I got the overall sizes and radius of the inside corners.Then I determined the overall outside dimensions and then started making rectangles in fusion.

Then make an extrusion from those rectangles

Then we made the inner bevel radius.

Then we make the bottom and right side thicker for better stability.

Now on the open side we need to create the bevel.

We also create a hole for the screw to hold the part on

And finally we put a bevel edge on the rest of the corners to finish it off

Next we put the file into our slicer and get it ready to convert to GCode.

We want this thing pretty strong so I decided to make it completely solid layers. Also after printing the first one without a brim, the second one we decided to have a brim on it to help it stick to the bed. But there is no need for supports printing it in this orientation.

I selected the print resolution at .2

Again we are working with ABS filament here so my temperatures are pretty high.

Attached here is also the STL for the part.

Print time was about 2 hours and 15 minutes at 60mm/s. The speed does not create the prettiest quality on my printer but its still solid and no layer separation.

We remove the brim from the part and do a little bit of clean up. Normally this is where I need to go back and make adjustments to the measurements but this time it slides right on with a snug fit. Not very often do I get the measurements right on the first go but this time it worked out perfectly. We are even printing a few extra of these to have around and keep in the canopy bag for future mishaps.

Now I have a functioning canopy and all it really took is about 5 hours of time including the print time. I tried to find this part to buy and couldn't locate it, so I made it, right here in my own house and that is the best thing about 3d printing.