My bathroom only has one towel rail. That's fine when there is only one person living here, but a bit inconvenient when there are two.
The company that makes the bathroom fittings do make a double towel rail, and you could probably get one for around $100. The down side is that they are very hard to find, and also the length is slightly different to the existing one. Once you had paid a tradesperson to tidy up the wall where they removed the old one, it is not going to be a quick job.
Enter the towel rail extension.
This is a bracket that attaches to the existing towel rail and allows you to attach a second one.
First you'll need a second rail that's similar to the first one.
This cost me $5.49 at Bunnings for a 900x19mm rail.
My existing rail is only 600mm so I needed to cut it to fit. This leaves a tube with open ends, so I designed and 3D printed some black end caps.
The company that makes the bathroom fittings do make a double towel rail, and you could probably get one for around $100. The down side is that they are very hard to find, and also the length is slightly different to the existing one. Once you had paid a tradesperson to tidy up the wall where they removed the old one, it is not going to be a quick job.
Enter the towel rail extension.
This is a bracket that attaches to the existing towel rail and allows you to attach a second one.
First you'll need a second rail that's similar to the first one.
This cost me $5.49 at Bunnings for a 900x19mm rail.
My existing rail is only 600mm so I needed to cut it to fit. This leaves a tube with open ends, so I designed and 3D printed some black end caps.
I worked out the angles and the rough design on paper, and then built it in OpenSCAD. I made the sizes customisable, so if you don't have the exact same diameter of tubing you can easily adjust it. The mock up in OpenSCAD looks like this.
I designed screw holes to put it together, and then I split the bracket into 3 pieces.
There's a piece that rests against the wall to hold the second rail in place. With the first 2 pieces attached it looks like this.
You can see the detail of how it is screwed together.
Now with 2 brackets in place I can fit my second rail and screw on the end pieces.
Works nicely.
If you are interested in making one you can see the design on Thingiverse.
Things I would do differently next time:
- The angle is still not quite right. Making the wall pieces slightly shorter would work better.
- I could incorporate an end cap into the bracket itself, rather than making it a ring around the second rail. That makes cutting the second rail to size more tricky though.
- The bracket fits the existing rail just slightly too loosely. I would probably make it 0.5mm smaller, but it's close enough.
3 comments:
Could you ask the helpful people at Bunnings to cut the piece to size for you? I have done that with wood for school projects before and they did it for free.
Well done Ben. Very clever
I thought about just asking Bunnings to do it, but I felt a bit silly, and also it gave me an excuse to buy more tools. (Hacksaw & round file)
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