How a custom fit is made, and how often it fails

Three shapes cover most pumps

The PALM comes in three fittings, and between them they cover most of the soap pumps in British bathrooms and kitchens. The fit guide is how you find out which one yours is, and it takes about a minute.

Some pumps are not any of them. Odd heads, square heads, levers that come off sideways, bottles somebody was given and likes too much to replace. That is what a made-to-measure fitting is for: a part cut for one named pump rather than for a shape.

It starts with your bottle, not a catalogue

There is no scanner and no clever software. It starts with photographs of your actual pump — one from the side, with a 2p coin next to it so there is something of a known size in the frame — and two measurements across the top of the head: the widest way, and the narrow way.

That is genuinely all I need to start. A phone photo on a kitchen worktop is fine.

Then it gets drawn, printed, and put on the bottle

The part is drawn to those numbers, printed, and then the only test that counts: it goes on the real pump and I try to pull it off.

The first one often does not work. That is not a disclaimer, it is just what happens. The first part I made for the IKEA TACKAN went on and sat there correctly — the shape was right — and then slid straight off if I tipped the bottle. The second one gripped, but not in the way I wanted it to.

A red 3D-printed PALM disc fitted onto the white L-shaped head of an IKEA TACKAN soap pump, held in one hand. The disc is embossed PALM by handl and gethandl.co.uk. — **This is one of the attempts, not the finished part.** Photographed on the actual IKEA TACKAN on 1 October 2026. It fitted, and it did not hold the way it needed to, so it is not the fitting now made for that bottle — the one that holds came after it and has not been photographed yet. It is printed in red test filament, which is simply what was on the printer that day. **Every part sent to a customer is printed in the colour they chose.**

What actually fixed it

The thing that made it grip was not making it tighter. A fitting holds onto a pump head by catching on something narrower than the rest of the head — so the answer was two small ridges standing six tenths of a millimetre proud on the inside faces, which bite as the part is pushed on. Making the whole channel smaller would have made it harder to get on and no more likely to stay.

Three attempts, then, for one bottle: one that seated and slid off, one that held wrongly, and one that goes on and stays on. That is a normal number.

What that does and does not prove

I would rather say this plainly than have you assume more than I know.

It was tested on one bottle, once. One IKEA TACKAN, bought on 1 October 2026, by me, by hand. That is a real result and it is also a small one.
The measurements behind it are good but not perfect. Two of them came off a digital calliper and the rest off a steel rule held next to the part in a photograph, which carries an error of perhaps a tenth either way.
Three things changed between the attempt that failed and the one that worked, so I cannot tell you which of the three did the work. The next pump starts from measurements again rather than from an assumption.

None of this is laboratory testing and I do not describe it as such. How I test it says the same thing about the standard range.

What it costs you if it cannot be done

Nothing. You pay when you order, I look at your photographs, and if I cannot make a fitting that holds your pump I say so and you get your money back in full — the ordinary 30-day returns, nothing special invented for this.

Nothing is printed until the fit has been confirmed with you.

If your bottle is already on the list

Some bottles have been done already, and those need none of the above — the part exists, it has been tried on that bottle, and there is nothing to send and nothing to wait for. The fit guide lists the ones that are confirmed.

Order a made-to-measure fitting Check which fitting you need first