Most of my modeling energy has been in to some longer term projects I'm working on. So I didn't get much printed this month.
First up was a modification to my organizer for The Guild of Merchant Explorers. The guy that runs the board-game group was impressed with my design and wanted one for himself, but he puts all his cards in sleeves. So I modified the card trays for sleeved cards and printed him a copy. The modified version is up on MakerWorld with the original.
The cats had an altercation at the window screen the other night and when we came out to investigate (at 2am) we found that the screen had been pushed in ~4-5 inches and the little plastic catch that holds it in place was broken. So apparently a neighborhood cat threw itself at the screen?
So I measured things and designed and printed out little catches that pressure-fit into the jamb opening and hold the screen in place. Seem to work pretty well. I couldn't get one out when I tried.
My big project lately has been an box organizer for The Guild of Merchant Explorers. It comes with no organization and you just have to stash everything in bags. This makes set up and take down a pain and unnecessarily long.
A couple organizers for the game already exist on the 3D printing websites, but I wanted something better. Something that could stand up to the box being turned sideways or upside down without making a mess. So, naturally, I designed my own to meet my stringent criteria. Also, designing it myself let me spruce it up with premium details.
A challenge of keeping pieces from scattering is that there is space between all the components and the lid when the box is closed. It's only about 2mm, but that's enough for cards and bits of cardboard to slide around.
So to accomplish my goal of keeping pieces from going everywhere when the box is turned I created my trays to nest on each other so there's not enough room for pieces to slide out when they come apart a little bit. This works great, but you'll have a tray on top with nothing above it. So for that case I printed covers which set into the trays to keep things in place.
The game has 3 decks of cards that you use regularly (and 1 which is used only at set up). As a little nicety I chamfered the bottom of the tray so when you press on the side of the card the other side pops up a little making it easier to grab.
Finally, I added the symbols used in each section of the trays to identify what components go where. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the final results. Set up and take down are now almost instantaneous. And I already got a request from someone at the board game meetup to print one for them.
Some of my design notes from the project. I worked on it for about a month before I decided I was happy with it and printed it.
For the last 8 years I've organized and run an event at work called Developer Day to encourage software developers to interact with each other and learn about the various projects happening around the Lab.
To encourage attendance and participation I give out door prizes--usually whatever I find interesting off of Amazon. This year I augmented the prizes with some 3D printed things I designed.
First up is building 453. This is the main supercomputer building on site and the building where we've been holding the event. I modeled it based on aerial imagery from Google Maps and some educated guesses from first-hand information. Then I put it on a base and added the Lab logo and some text. It's about the size of a credit card. The big bland block on the back is the machine building where the supercomputers are housed.
Then I played around with a couple of designs of these text blocks. They're hollow, about 2.5 inches long, and 3/4 of an inch tall.
And then I thought it might be fun to do something with light and the translucency of the filament material. So I designed these blocks which show LLNL when light shines through them.
And my final project of the month was modeling the Trinidad Head Light Station in Trindad, CA. One of the projects my team runs is named after this lighthouse and I'm considering printing a few of these for those team members.
I printed this in parts and assembled it after so I could get the differing colors without wasting a huge amount of filament switching back and forth during the print. I'm pretty happy with it. I'm very pleased with how the assembly went.
My skills with SolveSpace continue to improve. Also, my pull request to implement text kerning was merged, so I'm officially a contributor to that project.
In June I designed these battery organizers. A lot of battery organizers already exist, but almost all of them are tall whereas I wanted something to fit in the drawer in the kitchen (where we previously organized our batteries in a cardboard box). They're not perfect, but they're good enough. The angle they sit on probably needs to be steeper to encourage them to roll forward better.
The labeling on the front of each was completed in Bambu Studio after designing the rest in SolveSpace.
The fabric on one of my speakers has been coming off one side for a long time now. It's under tension so I'm not sure how I could glue it back on effectively, but I designed and printed some clips that are doing a pretty good job of holding it in place.
At some point I realized we were missing out on a great home-customization possibility: light-switch plates! I found existing plate models someone shared and started putting designs on them. It's fun. The girls picked out some dragons for their rooms. I made a tree for the living room, a butterfly near the front door, and a lighthouse in the kitchen.
The multi-color ones take some work because you have to put each color in separate SVGs and then align them correctly on the model.
I also discovered that the switch box in the living room is not aligned with the plane of the drywall, so to get my switch plate to sit flush against the wall I had to make it deeper and then cut the back off (in the model, not physically) at an angle to match so that it didn't leave noticeable gaps on one side.
With a 3D printer, I feel I should catalog the things I've designed and printed this month. I imagine there will be fewer in general in the future.
Sliding-door latch cover
First was a cover for the sliding-door latch. The original one came off many years ago now. I think we found it but didn't know what it was. So it sat on the kitchen counter for months until we gave up and threw it away. Of course, it was only then that we realized it had probably been for the sliding door--which was now just a bit of bare metal. But not anymore!
Designed in Bambu Studio. I would export to an STL, but it fails due to self-intersections in the mesh. But it prints fine.
The little cowl that holds the curtain rod in place snapped off many years ago and the rod has sat lying on the window sill since then. But, less than 1 cent later, it's back up and working again.
My most ambitious project so far, I designed a set of organizers for the Kinfire Chronicles game. They stack in the box where the riser, loot box, and spacer foam originally sit.
Tan would work better for the color scheme than the yellow I used, but I didn't have any tan filament.
I designed this entirely in Bambu Studio and again had issues trying to export STL files. I started recreating it again in SolveSpace as a way to learn that program, but I haven't finished yet.
I had to take a detour to implement text kerning in the SolveSpace code base. I have an open pull request on that project to get the new feature merged into the application.
The cardbox models came out ridiculously large (96 and 10 MB each) when I converted them as much to meshes as I could. Hoping that won't be problem when I finish re-implementing them.
I bought an R/C car from RadioShack when I was in middle school and it's followed me around since then. Several years ago I pulled it out and let Heather drive it around. She ran it into a curb and a bracket that attaches the front-left wheel to the chassis snapped. Not really her fault, the plastic was just old and brittle.
So it went back on a shelf in the garage waiting for me to figure out a way to repair it. I tried a number of things, but nothing functional. It needs to hold a smooth cylinder for the wheel joint to pivot in, so I couldn't just glue stuff together.
I took this as another opportunity to learn how to effectively use SolveSpace and carefully measured all the parts and recreated the bracket. I printed two, making adjustments each time, before realizing that was a dumb way to fine-tune it. Especially since I couldn't actually see what the problems were. Instead I took a picture and overlaid it on the part I was designing to make the final adjustments (which were down to tenths of a millimeter).
That worked great, the part fit, and the car is back in business.
Designed in SolveSpace. The original file, a STL export, and a STEP export:
