<< West of Morse Creek

05/16/15 - Replacement Stove Knobs

We have an old Jenn Air electric cooktop which is basically in pretty good shape. The only problem is that the old stove knobs have become illegible. We tried to find new ones, but Jenn Air changed the knob design and has run out of its stock of old replacement knobs.

Luckily, we live in the age of 3D printing, so we fired up the old 3D modeling program - we use Cheetah3D - and designed a new stove knob. This meant measuring the old ones with calipers and designing some new ones which would be easier to read and work with our old cooktop.

We uploaded the 3D model to the Shapeways web site, did a little tweaking, and two weeks later we'd get a stove knob in the mail. The first two really didn't work, but on our third try, the knob worked. We submitted an order to print three more, and two weeks later we had a new set of stove knobs. We first heard of 3D printing technology back in 1979. Maybe the future is coming after all.

If you want your own print out of a stove knob for an ancient (pre-D post) Jenn Air stove knob, check out the product site at Shapeways.


Our replacement Jenn Air electric range control knobs

Keywords: science, art