Tag: 3d-printing

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.

I think these are super fun.

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.

Curtain-rod hook cowl

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.

Designed in Bambu Studio.

Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall organizers

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.

R/C Car Part

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: