February 27, 2020
Description
Those tubes were designed to hold American-style poker chips (casino cheques) in standard 39mm diameter.
The end caps lock with a screw mechanism that will lock with a little "click". They have a pseudo "seal" that reaches about 1mm into the tube on both ends, which is supposed to better keep lint out of them.
But of course, at the end of the day, these are simply tube-shaped closeable containers - you can put anything in them.
There are multiple end cap variants:
I am also planning to make another variant where you can insert a label on the inside of the cap that for example acts as seating indicator. Since they won't be visible while the tube is closed, you will be able to easily randomize seating for tournaments if you put players' starting stacks into such tubes.
The measurements of the tube assume that you are storing high-quality American-style clay (Paulson, CPC) or ceramic (Sun-Fly) poker chips in them. Cheap plastic chips, especially the heavy metal slugged ones, could be thicker so you might be unable to fit the full amount of chips they were designed for. If you are planning to store chips from an American casino in them and are unsure: Most of these should fit well.
The tube design is parametric; I can generate them with arbitrary inner diameter (e.g. for 43mm diameter chips) and length. The caps will scale with that, thickening a couple of features, but I suspect this scaling isn't optimal yet.
Unfortunately, since I created the model with Autodesk Inventor, there is no easy way for other people to make use of the parametric design - unless you own a copy of the software, that is. So I've limited the STL download bundle here to a couple common capacities: 25 chips, 20 chips and 10 chips (to carry a shuffling stack around, for example).
Print with a 0.4mm nozzle, 0.2mm layer height. Pick the infill of your choice as long as it is dense enough; I personally like the looks of Honeycomb 15% best when printing transparent/translucent materials.
The tolerances in these models are very tight. A well-calibrated printer with precise print head positioning is an absolute must, otherwise the printed parts will very likely not fit together. Both the Prusa i3 as well as the Prusa Mini are technically fit for printing these, but you must calibrate them well - in particular the Z offset.
Do not, under any circumstances, print the tubes with a brim! The smooth PEI sheet, cleaned with 99% isopropyl alcohol, will provide enough adhesion for a PETG print. For the end caps, you can use the textured PEI sheet too.
Note: While printing these with PLA technically works, this results in very brittle prints and the caps are fairly hard to screw on and off. I do not recommend using this material. Do use PETG if you can. Even with PETG, please do not assume these tubes will survive a drop. The tube will likely break, although it does provide some initial impact protection for the chips themselves, so it's still better than nothing at all for sure. Results from my personal drop tests show that the weak spots are the prongs of the end caps.
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Noncommercial
8
Skewed Perception
