Divide and Conquer (in the kitchen)

Well the wife had been making due with some cardboard wrapped with shelving liner to create dividers for her utensil drawer and I just kept telling myself “I’ve got a laser that can make it cleaner …”.

But, I just kept putting it off until she commented about it being warmer now and fresh air is available (read the windows can be opened).

So I quickly got a tape measure and find the diagonal distances and the height of the utensil sections. Opened up Inkscape, made the dividers with 1/4 rounded corners, saved it out as a Plain SVG and loaded it into the GFUI.

Now I have a local plastics place in town and they have scrap drops of 1/8 inch Black Delrin that came out to about $2 per piece and they get them regularly because of another of their customers have regular monthly job runs.

Normally, the plastics place charges $14.75 per square foot for 1/8" Delrin. This is going to be a cheap GF :glowforge: material “drug” at $2 per scrap piece.

I have discovered that to prevent flashback from the honeycomb tray, I just need to put down some 60# Hobby Lobby card stock. So I slap the Delrin in and about a minute per cut, I soon had a finished product.

Proud of myself, I carry the dividers into the kitchen, pull out the cardboard dividers and discover measure twice and cut once applies here.

They are all too short. That because I used a tape measure to guess the finished length by looking at the bend radius (since I was too lazy to pull the unit out of the draw and get an unobstructed straight measurement).

So I got out the calipers and measured the remaining distance. Using my “fine” 55+ memory, I made the mental note of the additional length requires for each of the pieces. Opened up Inkscape and stretched the rectangles to appropriate distances.

Put in another $2 scrap piece, adjusted the angles of the layout in the GFUI and a couple minutes later I had dividers. Returned to the kitchen and installed the dividers except for one…

Measure twice, cut once AND write the measurements down properly! This time one was TOO long. Nuts! Really didn’t want to use another piece of Delrin.

:brain: I realized I could put a piece of cardboard in the GF :glowforge:, cut the proper size hole in it (once I triple checked my Inkscape rectangle shape) and put the too long piece to one edge of the hole, force it down with magnets and let the long end hang out past the hole. Then just hit print again and SUCCESS!!

So quick was not quite quick, but the dirty label definitely applies.

Finish install pic:

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a: practical jobs!

b: dammit why don’t i have a good plastics place around? it’s not like i don’t live in one of the top 5 metropolitan areas in the country. and yet… no.

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Isn’t that measure twice, cut once, buy extra? :innocent:

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or measure twice, cut once, go back to the store to buy more, try again?

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Great job on the dividers. This is one of the projects that my wife wants me to do for our kitchen drawers as well. Just have a few other projects of my own to do first :slight_smile:

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Wow! Sweet pricing on the Delrin. Great product. I’m sure your wife is happy.

BTW, Delrin remnants are 75% off this Friday at https://coloradoplastics.com/retail-wholesale :wink:

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