I have an uneasy relationship with my miniature refrigerator. This chilly bastard decided to get clever and fall open over the weekend. I stepped in to the lab to find it iced up and dripping all over the floor. It was running so hard the housing climbed up to something like 90 degrees. Now, maybe I didn’t shut it properly over the weekend, but I’ve seen this fridge swing open when a gnat coughed. It was time for a change.

I designed a clip to solve this problem. I modeled it in a half hour and it took my Ultimaker a bit more than two to print it. I’m very happy with how it turned out. This clip has an integrated spring and a central rib to optimize the stiffness without adding tons of thickness (i.e. more print time). It attaches to the fridge body with three rivets. For the rivet holes I wrapped my drill in some electrical tape to make sure it didn’t plunge too far into the insulation and damage anything. It was installed in a snap and hopefully will prove a permanent solution to an annoying problem.

Now, maybe I de-iced the fridge with a jeweler’s hammer and possibly I may have punctured the icebox enclosure. In that case i would have patched the hole with foil tape, opened a window, and said no more about it.

You can download the source files including the SW here on Thingiverse. If you have SW2014 you can check out the trick I like doing with extruding a line chain as a thin to make quick design changes easier.