Machine knitting: taking a stand

In my apartment we are lucky enough to have a big countertop, open on three sides, creating a nice flat project surface for even sprawling projects.

However, we also have a lot of projects that compete for this space! Producer Amy is often working on increasingly complex sewing projects that require the entire surface. Likewise, the knitting machine occupies an entire edge of the space. Both of these are time consuming, with potentially complex setup and teardown procedures. How can we accommodate both fiber arts hobbies?

You may not be surprised to find that I found inspiration from Carson (@KnitFactoryImpl) on YouTube. In her videos I noticed a low-profile metal stand that basically amounts to a single horizontal bar and four splayed legs, clamped together by a couple of big screws. She mentioned briefly that they aren't manufactured anymore, but you can find them on eBay "from time to time".

With the fear of scarcity in my heart, I jumped when I found a similar one on eBay a few days later.

Black metal stand parts organized on a background of green carpet tiles.

As you can see in the photo, the stand can break down quite small! Pictured here are 5 of the 6 parts required for it to work. The long body bar has circular recesses where the knitting machine can be securely clamped, as well as slots for the legs. Each leg splays out at an angle to withstand the force of moving the machine back and forth. The body bar and legs are held together with a pair of screws and wingnuts, and the screws are at the end of long bent metal bars which do double-duty to provide some stability for the mounted knitting machine, as well as providing a place to rest the top of the knitting machine.

You may note that I said "5 of the 6" in the previous paragraph. One of the screw/bar pieces was missing. Thankfully the seller had simply misplaced it and, after contacting them, they found it and mailed it to me.

Meanwhile... If you have a keen eye you may have noticed another missing part. Because each leg splays out at an angle, each also has a rubber foot with a special shape to let it rest flat and provide traction. One of the legs was missing this foot.

In this house we 3D print, so I dusted off my calipers, OpenSCAD, and trigonometry skills to make a replacement. I'll attach the OpenSCAD and final STL files to this post for posterity, but I definitely hit a point where the math looked right but the piece looked wrong, so I did some eyeball-based adjustments when tweaking the foot's resting face angle and a fudge factor to help the foot slip onto the machine leg.

Bambu X1C printing a foot in bright red TPU filament.

Close-up of the four machine legs lined up against a wall. Three legs have black rubber feet and one has a bright red 3D-printed TPU foot.

Now I can machine knit without taking up the countertop space. This reduces my anxiety about having the machine "out" for long periods of time as I practice skills or work on more time-consuming project.