Skin Wedges Gridfinity Holder

This tray will hold a total of 4 hardened steel skin wedges in 1x5 Gridfinity squares.  These wedges are sold for aircraft sheet metal repair work; they can be used to pry and separate thin aluminum skins while minimizing the damage done in the process.  When the original batches of these wedges hit the market, they were made from 4130 chrome-moly steel, which isn't really hardenable enough to be used for prying without damaging the tool, so it's common for the tips to be pretty bent up after being used a few times, and they can only be beaten back into shape just so many times before breaking.  I think most of the ones available now are made from 4140, which is much tougher overall, and should hold up better.

I originally tried to make the recess for the tip a closer match for the contour of the tool.  I quickly realized that there is a lot of variation in the shape of these as manufactured, and that's before they have been bent out of shape through use.  So I ended up modeling a very generous void space for the tips, so the wedges should fit even after they've been abused a bit.  There was room to fit 4 wedges, so that's what I did, even though they are commonly sold in sets of 3.  Even without a lot of space separating the wedges, they're still easy to pull out by grabbing the tip instead of the handle.

Like my other Gridfinity models, the base is altered to accept 6x3 magnets as a press fit, with the upper surface of the magnet holes modified to make the slicer bridge across correctly for a clean result.  Due to the size of this model, I have included sacrificial “mouse ears” in the CAD to give the ends more surface area to help prevent them warping off the bed.  These will need to be removed after printing.

The unit pictured was printed out of Overture PLA on my bear upgraded Mk3S+, using a 0.6mm nozzle, at 0.3mm layer height.

Skin Wedges