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Bernese mountain dog gets a barrel, for reasons...

It is iconic for Swiss mountain dogs (e.g. Bernese, St. Bernards etc.) to carry a barrel below their necks. Mine also deserves one.

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Milli is the "goodest" girl and we wanted to celebrate her heritage with something iconic. A dog barrel. She likes good smells (she loves to smell flowers and grass every day), be pretty and the attention! So I decided to design a dog barrel for her long time ago. Finally, I had the time and motivation for it. I didn't like the barrel designs out there so I made one, which needed to be aesthetic but also can be extended with more features... For now, it is for poop bags, maybe a small bottle of Schnaps and definitely an action cam for 1st dog view of her adventures. There is plenty of space in a barrel. Perhaps we can fit a GPS tracker with LoraWAN in the future.

Some videos of her running wild with the barrel will follow soon!

The parts were designed first as a single piece in FreeCAD almost fully parametric (adjusting numbers may or may not break the design). Then each half was created from the full design for the decoration.

I wanted to be able to press the action cam buttons from outside, therefore I made those parts of the outer shell flexible with cuts.

Decoration means basically wood-look. This part can be perhaps automated with textures but for now I simply used the sculpture mode in Blender. Sadly, any change to the model would require a new blender edit on STLs. I printed the parts with organic supports. You will need them especially inside and removal is slightly tricky.

2 parts are held together with strong magnets. I used a thin layer of hot glue for a water tight fit. I describe the workflow on my blog here: https://sarentasciyan.eu/how-to-simply-make-rubber-feet-for-projects/

Magnets are glues with superglue and then further supported with hot glue. For proper orientation, pairs of the magnets are in opposite orientation.

Also, I have placed 3 M3 screw ports with square nuts (I had them from my very first 3D printer lying around) for a tighter/stronger assembly.

I decided to paint the parts with acrylic paint, I happened to have. After printing in black PLA, I coated with transparent acrylic varnish spray first. Then I had to paint 2-3 layers of paint to get a good color quality. Finally, to protect it from water, I coated the hole outer surface with polyurethane spray, which also gave a nice glossy look.

A.stl

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 43.67 MB - 05/16/2025 at 16:46

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B.stl

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 38.46 MB - 05/16/2025 at 16:46

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  • 1
    Printing

    I used PLA. If you want to paint it, choose a suitable base color. Use supports, especially inside of each part.

  • 2
    Waterproofing

    I used hot glue to protect it from splash water. Instructions are on my blog how make those: https://sarentasciyan.eu/how-to-simply-make-rubber-feet-for-projects/

    Honestly, this also fixes a problem in the design. My action cam didn't fit perfectly, since the space was half a mm too tight. Hot glue bridges that gap too.

  • 3
    Magnets / Assembly

    I used 10 mm diameter, 3 mm thick cylindrical magnets, which I first glued with super glue then with hot glue.

    You can also use 3x M3x16 hex screws with square nuts for a stronger assembly.

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davedarko wrote 05/19/2025 at 08:37 point

And yet, no picture of Milli :[

  Are you sure? yes | no

Saren Tasciyan wrote 05/19/2025 at 10:29 point

It has been a bit rainy last couple of days in Vienna. I want to take her out on a nice grass area for the photoshooting + action cam footage :)

  Are you sure? yes | no

Saren Tasciyan wrote 05/20/2025 at 21:01 point

There you go :)

  Are you sure? yes | no

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