Hey folks,
New user here and I’m enjoying my GF. Bought it to do some projects with my daughter and she’s already made a nice sale to a local restaurant. They wanted 30 of these 4" cubes:
They wanted a blackboard on one side so they could use a crayon to write down daily specials. Lots of work, but fun for the two of us
So, like many of you, I went out and purchased a whole slew of materials, and now I have nowhere to store any of them. I thought I would try and create a 100% GF build stackable tray storage.
While It’s not perfect, it works pretty well so far. I’ve printed out two of them and they’re nice–I think the legs could be a bit longer so there’s more space between the trays. Easy enough to modify the SVG. And for those interested, I build this all in Blender. Open and saved in Inkscape, and then used Deepnest to process the files so they maximized the sheet arrangement.
A single tray can be made from two 12" x 18" x 3mm mdf which I purchased from Amazon: (afflink) https://amzn.to/3w5csUd
It comes out to under $5 per tray and each print is under 10min long.
The goal was to create something that was large enough but could be made with simple materials on any GF. While it can go together w/out glue, I find glue makes it more structurally sound, and if you want it even tighter, there are corner holes in the bottom to cross wire (or turnbuckle) to get it even more rigid. That said, I haven’t yet tried it b/c the glued version works fine for me.
Here’s a link to the file if anyone wants to try it out:
That’s very nice - and with the cut-out, easy enough to lift the upper ones if you need what’s in a lower one.
It also works a little like a sorting tray - put pieces in that have been cut and if they’re really small they’ll fall through to the next level
Nice design. I’m not sure you’ll find it practical as you continue to collect materials over time (if all of my materials were stacked in one pile, I’d never be able to access anything!), but I could find lots of other uses for trays like that.
I’ve never heard of Deepnest. Are you referring to https://deepnest.io/? That looks like a good tool to have in ones toolbelt. I’ve always done my layouts and part arrangement by hand.
How awesome for your daughter to make a sell like that! And thank you for sharing the box. Looks very practical and handy for all sorts (no pun intended) of things!
Just be aware that unless they changed something, deepnest has a habit of changing measurements slightly. It’s very slight, but important if you need your measurements to be spot on.
I can’t remember the change between Inkscape and the deepnest output, since it’s been a couple years since I tried (like I said, it could’ve changed since then), but I remember deepnest made everything slightly larger.
I was using it to try and nest some items for a client that does dollhouse miniatures, and everything was slightly too big, like a millimeter or so, nothing I could tell just by looking-but it was a huge difference for her.
