This began some time back when I found that the cleaner attachment for my Zyliss garlic press stopped working. Through careless use I had bent some pins and it only got worse from there.

It was not hard to reverse engineer the geometry from a photo, but that turned out to be the least of my problems.

For my first attempt, I printed it the most obvious way, out of PLA with pins printed vertically. It crumbled with first contact with the press. I put the whole project aside until much later when I wanted to try PETG. This was unsuccessful. The stringing between pins was substantial, and the pins themselves were still too weak to use.

After a lot of trial and error, I eventually came up with this:

It prints flat, matches the hole spacing well enough to use in every row including the one with 4 holes. Since there are at most 8 holes in a row, cleaning the press is as simple as two applications per row and takes about 30 seconds. You could use a toothpick, but somehow the 4x improvement changes the task from tedious to easy and fun.

If you came here looking for a garlic press cleaner, I recommend this one. You can probably use it in other garlic presses. It may require some scaling.

But my quest was not over. I just needed to print the pins horizontally, and this was nagging me. The 3d-printer can bridge short distances, so why not print the pins as bridges? It still needs support on one side. I tried some designs hoping for a snap-off support but never got one. This works as long as you cut off the support.

The pins are printed at 0.2mm in one weak spot. This breaks easily enough that a razor will cut right through with a light push. It does not even have to be especially sharp. The photos illustrate that it fits the Zyliss. I could improve the handle somewhat but this is a proof of concept. I have tested it to clean the press after crushing garlic. I will still probably go back to the 4-prong cleaner for normal use.