Overview
I designed this keychain based on my padel racket. I’m not reporting the brand and model to avoid copyright issues, but it would be clear to all the Padel lovers.
Padel has become one of my favorite sports to play outside of robotics and 3D printing, and like most players I got a bit attached to my own racket, its shape, the hole pattern across the face, the rounded edges. Modeling a miniature of it as a keychain felt like a fun way to carry a small piece of that around, and a much better souvenir than yet another generic keychain from a sports shop.
The model keeps the racket’s silhouette and the perforation pattern recognizable at a small scale, which is the tricky part of shrinking any recognizable object down to keychain size: too much detail and the print turns into a blob, too little and it stops looking like anything at all. It prints flat, in a single color, and is small enough to finish in well under an hour, so it is an easy gift to print for other padel players in your circle.
After using the first version for a while, I revisited the design and released an improved Padel racket keychain v2 with larger holes and a circular handle, so if you print this one and want the refined version, that is where to find it.
I hope you will like it too.
If padel is not your sport but you play something else, the same idea works for pretty much any racket, paddle, or piece of equipment you have gotten attached to: keep the silhouette recognizable, simplify the fine detail down to keychain scale, and print it flat in a single color.
It has turned into a nice icebreaker at the club too; more than once another player has noticed it on my keys and asked where I got it, which is exactly the kind of small, unplanned payoff that makes designing your own objects worthwhile.
A small object, but a genuinely fun one to have designed myself and carried around ever since.
A small tribute to a sport I never expected to get this attached to.
Leaving the brand and model off the design was a deliberate choice, not an oversight: it keeps the model shareable without stepping on anyone’s trademark, while still being immediately recognizable to anyone who has held a padel racket in their hand.
Download
The model is free to download and print, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial.