Modular nesting build trays

There are a lot of beautiful and well-designed build/sorting tray designs available for 3D printing. However I have never really found any that truly fulfil my practical needs and wants. They are often incredibly sturdy and detailed, making each one a big investment in material cost, printing time and storage space. And then you are stuck with a single static layout that might never really be perfect for any future projects.

About 5-6 years ago, I quickly sketched and printed some incredibly simple small trays for use at work. Just square flat bottoms, thin straight walls and rounded vertical corners with no other features. Simple, quick and cheap to print from near-empty spools of filament that would otherwise have been thrown out. I eventually created a larger version for slightly bigger or larger quantity of items, that could also fit 4 of the original smaller trays inside for easy storage. Rather ironically, those simple trays have probably been my most used design/3D-prints ever, and I still use them almost every day at work.

This is an attempt at improving and expanding on that crude design to hopefully make it even more useful.

Features

• Nests inside each other, allowing for quick customisation of the number and size of compartments needed.

• Customisable/upgradeable down the line. Just print more individual compartments in whatever shape and size as the need arises.

• Colour-coding. Print compartments in different colours to colour-code sorting of items.

• Stackable for easy storage. Holes for the stacking taps on the outer tray doubles as a funnel for pouring small loose things into small bottles, containers etc.

• Works individually or in any combination as stand-alone containers/organisers, saving space on your work surface if you only need to store/sort a few items.

• Individual compartments are easily portable. Need to take one type of components somewhere else for a process in the build? Just pull out the individual tray and take it with you, and put it right back afterwards.

• Store anything. Small components, screws, LEGOs, beads, powder, glitter, sand, water, paint, cutting fluid...

• Cheap and quick to print. Largest outer tray only uses ~40g of filament, all the way down to >4g for the smallest. The "full sets" shown in the pictures only used ~220g total. Perfect and practical use for all those nearly empty spools of filament.

• Low cost means they become almost disposable. Use smaller trays for paint, oils, grease, glue, hot or dirty items etc. and throw them away if they become too nasty/damaged. Also no big loss if you lose them or someone "borrows" them.

Varieties

The different tray varieties are all named with a number between 1-3:

1. The outer larger stackable trays with a size of 150x150mm.

2. The middle sized trays that fit inside the larger trays. Comes in 74x74mm "quarter" and 74x148mm "half" versions.

3. The smallest sized trays that fit inside the medium trays. Comes in 35x35mm "quarter" and 35x71mm "half" versions.

The trays also come in a "tall" and "short" version. I generally recommend the "tall" versions for storing things like fluids, powders, glitter etc. that you don't want to spill, and the "short" versions for screws, small components and other things you want to be able to pick up with your fingers.

Printing

All trays are deliberately made to be incredibly easy and quick to print, so no special settings or supports are required. However, these are my recommendations:

Layer height: 0.2mm, combined with "Adaptive" Variable Layer Height at 0.50. (effectively ~0.1-0.3mm layer heights)

Brim: ON.  Might be printable without, but corners are almost certain to curl up during printing. Simple shape means brims are super easy to remove. I have managed to pull all of them off in one piece with my fingers and then just lightly scrape the edges for it to look nice.

Printing multiple trays at once: "Complete individual objects". Greatly helps reduce warping due to otherwise longer print time for each tray. Use the Arrange buttons in PrusaSlicer to calculate placement without collisions.