A soaker hose leaped under a descending garden fork and accumulated a nasty gash:
Mary deployed a spare and continued the mission, while I pondered how to fix such an odd shape.
For lack of anything smarter, I decided to put a form-fitting clamp around the hose, with silicone caulk buttered around the gash to (ideally) slow down any leakage:
As usual, some doodling got the solid model started:
A hose formed from chopped rubber doesn’t really have consistent dimensions, so I set up the model to spit out small test pieces:
Lots and lots of test pieces:
Each iteration produced a better fit, although the dimensions never really converged:
The overall model looks about like you’d expect:
The clamp must hold its shape around a hose carrying 100 psi (for real!) water, so I put 100 mil aluminum backing plates on either side. Were you doing this for real, you’d shape the plates with a CNC mill, but I just bandsawed them to about the right size and transfer-punched the hole positions:
Some drill press action with a slightly oversize drill compensated for any misalignment and Mr Disk Sander rounded the corners to match the plastic block:
A handful of stainless steel 8-32 screws holds the whole mess together:
These hoses spend their lives at rest under a layer of mulch, so I’m ignoring the entire problem of stress relief at those sharp block edges. We’ll see how this plays out in real life, probably next year.
I haven’t tested it under pressure, but it sure looks capable!
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
