Product Design · Functional mechanical parts

Organic Bracket Design — Conventional vs Organic

A conventional, machined-style bracket next to organic, load-driven alternatives, all printed by FORMYQ on FDM — what changes when material follows the load instead of the stock it was cut from.

Two orange brackets side by side: on the left a conventional bracket with a flat base plate, four bosses, a thin upright web and a cylindrical boss; on the right an organic bracket whose two flowing legs split into feet with mounting eyelets — Conventional vs organic. Left: the baseline — a plate, four bosses, one thin web and the top boss. Right: the organic alternative keeps the mounting feet and the top boss, but replaces the web with two legs that blend into a saddle under the boss. Photo — colour graded.

Problem

Most printed brackets are modelled the way they would be machined: a flat base plate, bolt bosses, an upright web and a bored boss for a pin or shaft. That is quick to model and easy to edit, but the material sits where the stock was, not where the load goes. In the baseline here, everything the top boss carries passes through one thin web, the web meets the plate at sharp internal corners, and much of the plate does little work.

Requirements

Keep the interfaces of the conventional part — the mounting points on the base and the bored boss on top — so an organic version can replace it without changing anything around it. Shape the material in between around the load path. Keep every surface printable on an FDM machine with little or no support, and keep every member thick enough to print with solid perimeters rather than infill.

Challenges

• Layer direction: FDM parts are weakest across their layers, so the print orientation has to be chosen with the load path in mind, not just the flattest face. • Overhangs: smooth organic surfaces need to stay self-supporting, or be supported where the marks can be cleaned up. • Eyelets and bores: holes in thin organic members need enough wall around them, and bores that take pins or bearings are better served by inserts, bushings or reaming than by the printed surface alone. • Editability: an organic shape is harder to change than a feature-based CAD part, so the interfaces stay as clean, dimensioned features.

Iterations

1. Conventional baseline — base plate with four bosses, an upright web and a bored top boss. 2. Two-leg organic redesign — the same mounting feet and top boss, with the web replaced by two flowing legs that split into feet and blend into a saddle under the boss. 3. Four-arm organic hub — a separate concept in which four branching arms run from a central bored boss out to four mounting eyelets.

Manufacturing notes

Every part shown was printed by FORMYQ on FDM printers; the layer lines visible in the photos are from the print. The photos were colour graded afterwards for presentation — the parts themselves are shown as printed. We don't quote weight, strength or print-time figures for these parts until they have been measured.