I took the plane out for a weekend to Sky Acres, a particularly hilly airport, and noticed that the club didn’t have any wheel chocks in the plane. I found some on the ramp, but thought it’d be more convenient to have a pair in the baggage area. This, combined with the need to use my Replicator 2X and a few minutes of spare time before a meeting, got me designing a pair of wheel chocks.

The initial design took about 5 minutes in OpenSCAD, but I then refined it after some test prints. It uses about 200g of black plastic and 17g of glow in the dark (!). The print took about 7 hours because it’s so big. That makes a total of 14 hours, plus another 4.5 hrs for a print that failed half way through!

I found some plastic rope at Pep Boys and designed a hole so I can keep the chocks connected. I used a soldering iron to cut through the rope so the ends didn’t fray.

I made the 3D files customizable and available for download on Thingiverse.