Dog Bootie Helper Tool

Problem

Before a cold snap I got booties for my dog and to my surprise they were $14 repurposed balloons. It was one of the cheapest and effective solutions to such a novel problem. Respect to the hustle of taking a well established product and turning it directly to profit. Trouble was how hard it would be to put it on the dogs paws.

Solution

Remembering a tool my dad had been given to help him wear compression socks. I figured I could easily make something like it to hold open the ballon and put the dogs paws inside. It would be a simple tool to help, that I could 3D print easily. With an idea in my head of a partial cylinder with a retractable support wall, I went to work.

3D print

Having a programming background my go-to 3D modeling program is OpenSCAD. It is an open source CAD tool that defines models with code. It honestly has a good amount of drawbacks, but when you only need to modify a small bit of code instead of directly editing something you repeated nine times it feels pretty good.

Bootie Tool Steps: shows step by step how easy it is to use

For the most part it was a fairly easy model. I went with a 220° hollow cylinder as a starting point and everything else seemed to just fall into place from there.