I've had this ironing board for about 15 years. It’s one of the oldest things in my apartment. It suits me because it's very solid; I've been using it a lot. It's dirty, it can't be washed, and, most importantly, the handles for attaching the legs have broken. They literally fell apart.

I felt sorry for the board; although I hate ironing, I like this board, so I thought I would fix it. However, I postponed the repair for two years because I didn't have to iron – one of the few good things Covid gave us.

The leg holders were torn from the board and had disintegrated after years of use. In fact, there was not much left of them. What's worse, they weren't even very regular geometric shapes, so I struggled for a few days on how to sketch them in Fusion 360.

A few days later, I happened to watch Fusion 360 tutorial (in Czech) on YouTube and came up with a way to get that atypical shape into Fusion 360. First, I took a picture of the handle with a ruler in the background, then uploaded the photo to Fusion 360 and aligned the centimetres from the photo to the grid in Fusion 360.

Next, I just drew over it with the Fit Point Spline tool. It was straightforward.

I measured the gaps on the old handles with a calliper and added them into my sketch with a simple rectangular pattern. Suddenly, I had four handles with the same gaps.

That wasn’t all. The old handles had bumps on the board to prevent the rods from quickly slipping out of the handle. Using a calliper, I measured these bumps, which were about 0.75 millimetres high and 3.5 millimetres wide. It was easy to add them to the model.

The last thing to do was to make screw holes. There are three of them, on the edges and in the middle.

The print took longer, five and a half hours. I printed at 0.2mm speed. Also, I increased the count of the perimeters of the handles to 5 to increase the strength.

The width of the new handle is 3 centimetres. After almost six hours of printing on the first try, the new handle was ready. It looked nice and solid.

In the end, on the first try, the scale was a bit off by a few per cent in Fusion 360, and the printed model is a bit bigger than the original. (I mean the handles.) It doesn't matter, though, as the rods stay in it anyway.

I screwed it into the board in spots where the old handle hadn’t pulled anything out of the board and held it tight.

Yes, I intentionally blurred the ironing board :) It's insanely spotty from the iron, and I don't want to share it with the internet.

I put the handles a little higher because I always iron to the highest level, so when I had the opportunity, I put them slightly higher while the board was still stable.

Is it perfect? Nope. I made one mistake: I put the screw holes too close to the handles, so the rod is much harder to slide into some of the handles because the screw protrudes. I've already adjusted that in my model, but I didn't want to print and drill a second time; I'll wait until it breaks again.

STL file

• Holder for the ironing board