Fruit Fly Trap with Oscillating Exterminating Orb

Fruit flies! A bit of fruit goes soft and suddenly you have a flurry of the annoying things around. There are many traps you can find here. Invariably they trap the little critters, which might collect inside the trap for quite a while before they end up expiring in the vinegar attractant. I wanted an easy way to finish them off quickly.

How about a trap that designs extermination in from the start? This little container has an opening to capture them – use a tiny bit of moist, ripe fruit inside.  There is a little shelf inside that holds a standard 14mm marble. 

Dislodged from the shelf with a shake, it becomes the Indiana Jones marble of doom, and the marble crushes the critters. Since the interior space is formed to fit the marble's curvature - there is no escape when you shake it.

Occasionally give the container a shake, and the marble slides up and down inside the container, squishing its residents. Easily tip to return the murderous marble to its holding space.

With a quick try near the kitchen fruit bowl and compost-holder it did indeed gather some of the little varmints. Just a satisfying shake to dispatch them.

While not a remix per se, a nod & thanks to Werner Stein on Thingiverse whose misc containers I borrowed to just to get the threads for making a lid part quickly

Notes:

The threaded lid is a bit tight in first print, but results might differ on your printer. They seem to get better with a bit of use or some light sanding to free them up.  (A bit of a rub with a wax candle often helps 3Dprinted PLA threads I find!)

The pic shown used a semi-translucent PLA for the body and white for the lid. I thought a brighter interior might encourage more visitors.

Design Date: Nov 2016

Category: Kitchen & Dining