3D-Printed Toothbrush Holders

Buying suction cup mounted toothbrush holders is hard, apparently.

Back in late December, during the seasonal buying frenzy, my wife searched *.Bargain stores and even some more illustreous outlets, fruitlessly, for a suction-cup mounted a toothbrush holder for her youngest daughter (my step-daughter) who is away at University. She's in halls of residence, and can't put up more firmly mounted furniture. Eventually, my wife bought a suction-cup mounted wire basket toiletries holder, but it didn't have a toothbrush holder.

In a rare show of confidence in my design abilities, my wife asked me if I could design something to fit, instead. Of course, busy as I was in my own retail frezy, I couldn't resist the challenge. So armed with my trusty Vernier calipers, took some measurements, and sketched some ideas up. Then, I hit the OpenSCAD hard, and eventually came up with this:

Underside view of an OpenSCAD 3D model of a toothbrush holder that can be mounted on the rim of a wire basket toiletries holder. The holder has a mounting block with three prongs that two toothbrushes can sit in. The mounting block has cutouts for the vertical wires of the basket

You can download the OpenSCAD code for this if you're interested, here: wire-basket-toothbrush-holder.scad

The mounting block clips over the rim of the wire basket of the toiletries holder. I had to make vertical grooves in the mounting block, spaced the same as the wires of the basket. Naturally, these are not that evenly spaced, so there's a bit of allowance for that. I eventually added more grooves halfway between, so that it can be mounted half a width right or left. There are also some holes horizontally through the block from front to back, that allow a cable tie to be fed through to stop it popping off. The prongs of the toothbrush holder are flat, but these are intended to be bent upwards manually after printing (after softening in hot water) to help keep the toothbrushes "on the hook". Obviously, there were a number of iterations and test prints. Just to make things a little bit more spicy, my 3D printer started to clog up and fail prints during this process - a problem I have not yet managed to get to the bottom of :-(

Anyway, it seems it went down well enough. I'll see if I can get a photo of it in use, to put up here. In the mean time, here's one of the "iterations" out of my trash PLA bin:

Oblique view of a late iteration of the wire basket toothbrush holder in 'Mightnight Sparly Blue' PLA showing the prongs bent after softening with hot water.

Of course, I wouldn't have entitled this post "3D-Printed Toothbrush Holders" in the plural if the yarn ended there...

So, inevitaby, my wife eventually asked if I could print one for our bathroom, as we've been using an old glass to hold our toothbrushes for ages - ever since I made our upcycled pallet-wood bathroom mirror unit, back in the second COVID-19 lockdown. Well, it's definitely not a wire-basket, so the original one won't cut it here.

One of the things I most like about OpenSCAD is that it's so easy to refactor old designs to account for new uses. So I made a few adjustments: I removed all the bits that were to do with clipping onto the wire, basket, made the block 5mm narrower, moved the holes that were for the cable tie, closer to the edge and up 5 mm or so, and finally, added a countersink to them too:

Front view of OpenSCAD model of screw-on toothbrush holder. The mounting block has three prongs at the top, with two countersunk screw holes through the mounting block from front to back.

Of course, the OpenSCAD code for this is also available for download, here: screw-on-toothbrush-holder.scad

Just for completeness, here it is in place:

Screw-on toothbrush holder, erm, screwed onto the side of our pallet-wood bathroom mirror. It has two toothbrushes in it - the closest is plastic, white and green, with blue bristles, which is partially obscuring the other one which is bamboo with grey bristles.

Screw-on toothbrush holder, erm, screwed onto the side of our pallet-wood bathroom mirror. It has no toothbrushes in it.

Not bad for about an hour's work - and no "iterations" either... however, the printer is up to it's tricks and blocking again, though this time it actually recovered, and the print is not perfect but the defects don't show too much, so I'm calling it "done". As if that ever means it's finished!