Plugs, caps and sleeves

Hole plugs, cable grommets, tube end caps, flanged bushings and bumper feet, sized from the hole, shaft or tube they fit.

Five small round parts with one thing in common: each is sized from something you already have — a hole, a shaft or a tube — rather than from a number you have to guess.

Hole plug fills a round hole, with a flange that stops it pushing through. Cable grommet lines a hole in a panel so a cable passes without rubbing on the edge. Tube end cap slips over the end of a round tube. Flanged bushing is a plain sleeve bearing: pressed into a hole, with a shaft turning inside it. Bumper foot screws on underneath a box or a board.

Anything that goes into a hole is made exactly the hole. The plug's shank and the sleeve of a grommet or bushing are the diameter you type, with no interference added. A printed outside comes out slightly large and a printed hole slightly small, so a line-to-line pair is already a push fit — and extra interference on a rigid plastic part does not make it grip harder, it stops it going in. If yours is loose, a drop of glue is the fix; if it will not go in, take a few tenths off the hole diameter.

Anything that passes or turns gets a clearance. The cable in a grommet, the shaft in a bushing and the tube in an end cap all get room from the same Fit control the other parts use: Tight, Normal or Loose. Custom takes the clearance as the whole difference across — a 6 mm cable with 0.4 clearance gets a 6.4 mm bore — which is the figure a fit test coupon gives you, so you can type it straight in. If the cable or shaft is too big to sleeve in the hole at all, the bore is held down and the panel says so in red.

Name the tube. An end cap is cut from the tube's real outside diameter, and trade sizes are not diameters: 3/4in PVC is 26.7 mm, 3/4in EMT conduit is 23.4 mm and 3/4in copper is 22.2 mm. Choose Type a diameter for anything else.

Feet use the fastener tables. Pick the screw and a counterbore or a countersink; the clearance hole and the head recess come from the published sizes, and the head sits a millimetre below the face that touches the floor. If the head will not fit the foot you typed, the foot is made bigger and the panel shows the size it was made.

Every part arrives the way it prints. Plugs, grommets and bushings stand on their flange; end caps stand on their closed end, so nothing has to bridge; feet stand on the flat face, with the rounded edge and the head recess on top. Nothing needs support. Nothing here has been test-printed for you either — the clearances are sensible starting points, and the Fit control is how you tune them to your printer. Run Print check over the result before you print.

1. Open the Generate panel from the left sidebar and choose Plugs, caps & sleeves (under Fasteners).
2. The part drops in as one printable body. The parameters open in the Properties panel.
3. Pick the Part: hole plug, cable grommet, tube end cap, flanged bushing or bumper foot. Only the sizes that part uses stay active.
4. Measure the hole, shaft or tube it fits and type that in — or, for an end cap, name the tube.
5. Pick a Fit for a grommet, bushing or end cap, or Custom to type the clearance you measured.
6. Print it exactly as it arrives: flange or closed end down, with nothing that needs support.