The automatic dog washer (Dog Blaster 3000) (Patreon)

I just wrapped up a project that at first blush sounds ridiculous, but it actually turned out to be one of the more useful video projects that I’ve made. The fundamental problem is our dog always gets really muddy whenever we let her out. When we bring her in we have to spray her off and she always shakes which makes us muddy and wet. I’ve tried various cleaning setups but I’ve been unable to find one that A) keeps us clean and B) effectively lets us get to her very muddy belly and inner legs.

Every time I wash the dog off I revisit the concept of a dog washer in my head so I finally decided to just go for it. It turned out to be a fun project with some neat mechanical design. Architecturally it feels quite solid and I plan to use it with my dog if I can get her acclimated to it (currently she hates it and wants to send it to design jail). If I can get her used to it I’d like to do another iteration to allow the arch to fold down for compact storage, add soap injection, and just generally robustifying everything.  

Just for fun I decided to limit myself to accessible tools only. This was partly to show how I’d prototype something like this without crazy tools - but also because I was eager to put some constraints on myself. I keep thinking about how much I enjoyed the project where I made a catapult using each category of tools in my shop. Having to figure out how to make a catapult with only a lathe or only the mill forced my brain to be more creative / ingenuitive which was really fun.

Although it was fun I’m not planning to make accessible tools the SOP. There are some other constraints that could be interesting such as total cost, part count, materials used, etc. Something I’m mulling over. 

I appreciate you and I hope you enjoy the project! I’ll be sharing the details soon for a patron only behind the scenes commentary stream.

-Shane