Dual use optionally minimalistic Babylon 5 Starfury Soap Dish

Motivation

I saw the new soap dishes contest and I finally had an idea of what to do for the last meters contest. → A soap dish that uses less then 5m of filament and thus meets the parameters for the “last meters” contest. 

Additional parameters

Apart from that I set myself some additionalö parameters:

• Fits a bar of “Kernseife” (a traditional type of soap, usually unscented and very effective)
• Allows for water drainage
• Provides best possible traction for a slippery soap

Modelling

Since I'm a software developer I used my favorite OpenSCAD. Of course the Model is fully customizable. However If it is parametrized to a large size the  <5m of filament limit cannot be guaranteed.

Just one more small change

The goal was reached, I had a design that would use less than 5 meters and meets my other parameters. 

However. 

There was this “the less the better” part of the contest description. And with four point something my design wasn't going to be somewhere near the top. And so a challenge was accepted: Create a minimalistic Soap Dish that used the least amount of filament while still using default parameters in the print settings like shells, top or bottom layers,… and that was still reasonably usable. E.g. not being overly fragile.

The result is the thing in the cover picture. Using only 0.75m it also prints in only 16 minutes.

On top of that it looks like a Starfury Fighter from Babylon 5. Well.. sort of..

Oh, have I mentioned that both designs are all in one OpenSCAD file? You can use a simple toggle switch to change from one design to another in the customizer. It automatically reduces the size of the mini version so it still fits when the soap is getting smaller. Both prints in the pictures share the same parameters except for the minimalistic version checkbox.

The small spikes grab small leftover pieces of soap, the larger spikes also guard small pieces and prevent them from falling off additionally they grab larger pieces as usual.

Some of the pictures show an intermediate version of the smaller design lacking the inner spikes.

Printing

Nothing special. The spikes however might double as a stringing test. So this is actually a “Tripple Use Soap Dish”.

Sidenote

Yes, we made the soap in the pictures ourselves and it turned out a bit bubbly on the first try.