3d printed battery holder for Bronica SQ-Ai

[reddesert]

The Bronica SQ-Ai 6x6 camera needs a battery holder/caddy to hold four LR44 button batteries (unlike earlier SQ's that used a single 6v battery). The holder is often missing and the part is no longer available. I think the camera can run off the power supplied by a motor drive, so probably a lot of the original caddies got lost, and now if you don't have or want to carry a motor drive you need a replacement holder. It is a bummer for a camera to be rendered inactive by a dopey little piece of plastic, but this is a perfect use for 3D printing.

There is a design for a battery holder on thingiverse, but I got mesh errors from the STL file (a non-solid rendering) when trying to have it printed or opening it in a CAD program. So I made a new design. It is freely available for printing from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5256045 If you don't have a 3D printer (I don't), you can send the STL file to a 3D printing service, or print it at your local maker space, public library, etc. I printed mine at a library. It takes so little material that they couldn't weigh it to know how much to charge me for materials.

You will need to cut four little pieces of thin sheet metal and bend them in a C shape to make the battery terminals that wrap from the + side of the battery to the other side where the camera contacts are, as shown in this photo of the printed holder. The metal pieces are held in by the batteries, so it's not a perfect design as they may fall out when you change the batteries, but just put them back, or run a piece of tape along the side to hold them. I verified that it works.

 

[Donald Qualls]

That looks like a nice solution to a silly design decision. Well done!

 

[grat]

FYI, I use a piece of software called DesignSpark Mechanical for doing 3D models-- it's a bit more than sketchup, a bit less than Fusion360, and it's free.

I discovered it's very good at fixing mesh errors by importing the STL, converting to 3D solid, then exporting as STL.

 

[reddesert]

That looks like a nice solution to a silly design decision. Well done!

Thanks. I read somewhere that when Bronica redesigned the SQ-A into the Ai, there was less room underneath and so they used LR44 button batteries rather than a 6v PX28. Or maybe people wanted to use button batteries rather than the PX28. I'm sure it was less of an issue when Bronica was actually operational. To me, 3D printing is not a cure-all - many 3D printed gadgets seem like less sturdy versions of something you can buy. But it is fantastic for this kind of replacement project, where you have a very custom part that doesn't have to be super strong or have a lot of moving pieces, but it would be a huge pain to try to machine, carve, or glue it together out of raw materials.

FYI, I use a piece of software called DesignSpark Mechanical for doing 3D models-- it's a bit more than sketchup, a bit less than Fusion360, and it's free.

I discovered it's very good at fixing mesh errors by importing the STL, converting to 3D solid, then exporting as STL.

That's a good tip, thanks. The first person's design looks fine in the thingiverse viewer, but when I opened the STL in Tinkercad many of the mesh points were connected in the wrong order, so to speak, and I had no idea how to fix them. I would up just rebuilding the part from scratch from Tinkercad primitive shapes. Tinkercad is surely not the best, but it was adequate for this.

 

[Donald Qualls]

To me, 3D printing is not a cure-all - many 3D printed gadgets seem like less sturdy versions of something you can buy. But it is fantastic for this kind of replacement project, where you have a very custom part that doesn't have to be super strong or have a lot of moving pieces, but it would be a huge pain to try to machine, carve, or glue it together out of raw materials.

I've 3D printed a number of parts that were pretty darned strong -- but they use a lot of filament. Moving parts, print fine but I'm not yet up to 3D drafting such (especially print-in-place hinges and such). But yes, you can print stuff (in a myriad of materials, depending on your budget) that is literally impossible to machine. Complete rocket thrust chambers with cooling passages and no welds, for instance -- back in the 1960s these were made (at NASA costs) with electroless nickel over a graphite liner; today they can be made (at nearing airliner engine cost) from titanium-niobium alloy with no liner needed and last for tens of launches instead of one...