Creating a Pool Noodle System with 3D Printing

I got a little carried away at the end of summer clearance sales. When I saw pool noodles marked down to 50 cents each, something clicked in my brain. These foam tubes weren’t just pool toys anymore—they were building materials waiting to be connected. So I bought 60 of them. I may have gotten a few looks, but I had a vision. What if we could create a universal connector system that would let anyone build whatever they wanted with pool noodles?

The first challenge hit me right away when I started measuring. Pool noodles aren’t standardized at all. Even noodles from the same company had different dimensions. The outside diameter varied, the holes inside were different sizes, and some were thicker than others. I spent way too long with my calipers measuring every single noodle to find the median dimensions. The foam stretches a bit, which helped, but I still needed to nail down the right measurements before I could design anything in Autodesk Fusion.

I started simple with a barbed connector piece. Think of it like a plumbing fitting—barbs on each end that would grip the inside of the pool noodle when you pushed them in. The middle section would act as a sleeve to join two barbs together. My first print was too small for the bigger holes, so I had to scale it up. After some tweaking, I had a working connector that could join two noodles end-to-end or bend one noodle into a loop. This basic piece became the foundation for everything else I would try to build.

The first real project was a pool raft. Nothing revolutionary, but it seemed like a good test for the connector system. I laid out ten noodles side by side and used two half-noodles perpendicular at the ends to hold everything together. This meant drilling holes through the sides of the noodles to insert the connectors. I started with a 3D printed hole cutter, but after bruising my ribs in a soccer game the week before, pushing that thing through foam was torture. A 3/4-inch drill bit worked way better and saved my ribs from further abuse.

The first raft attempt taught me some valuable lessons. I only connected the ends, thinking that would be enough, but the middle noodles had too much freedom to move around. The whole thing was floppy and had gaps you could fall through. Plus, I should have drilled completely through the end noodles so the connectors would grip better. The raft fell apart pretty quickly when I tried to use it. But the second version, where I lashed the noodles together with string in addition to the connectors, worked great. It was comfortable and stable enough to float around the pool.

Next, I wanted to try something more ambitious—a floating game structure. My kids suggested nine square or volleyball, so I designed corner connectors and tried to build intersecting nets. This is where things got humbling. The 90-degree corners had no resistance to twisting or bending. The whole structure would just collapse. I tried making a dome shape instead, thinking curves would be stronger than corners, but the thin pool noodles couldn’t hold any real structure. They bent inconsistently and the whole thing was a mess.

I thought bigger, thicker noodles might solve the problem, so I bought some and designed a three-way connector to build a dodecahedron—a 12-sided shape where each face is a pentagon. Even with the thicker noodles, a full-size version using 36-inch pieces would have been over eight feet tall but too flexible to hold its shape. When I cut the noodles down to one-foot sections, I finally got something that worked. It wasn’t the giant structure I envisioned, but it proved the connectors could work if the noodles were short enough to stay rigid.

Looking back, I probably got too focused on one idea and should have explored more options. The simple connectors worked great for flat structures like the raft, but complex 3D shapes pushed the limits of what foam pool noodles could do. Still, the whole experiment was worth it. We got a functional pool raft, I learned a ton about the material properties of pool noodles, and I got to spend time problem-solving and building something fun for my family. If you want to try designing your own pool noodle connectors or any other project, check out our Fusion for Makers course. We’re actually updating the entire course right now with all the latest features in Autodesk Fusion.

Thanks for following along with the build. Now, go make something awesome!