August 26, 2023
Description
A few days ago, I decided to dip a toe into the Gridfinity swimming pool, in order to consolidate my hardware drawer bins and make better use of my space. I quickly found that Zack's original bin designs, while awesome, still had some room for improvement (from my perspective). First, the 6x2 magnets are fine, but the 6x3 magnets are far more common, and I had a bunch of them left over after finishing my Voron build. Second, the holes for these magnets printed poorly, since the slicer tries to print the top surface concentrically instead of bridging. Third, the holes are oversized, so the magnets had to be glued in, which is time consuming and usually messy. I believe that in general, recesses for magnets in 3d prints should have a press fit, period.
The system is highly customizable, but the problem I ran into was a lack of available .stp files for the parts. If you're a fusion user, there's plenty of fusion files out there, but I'm not and the CAD software I use can't read them. I finally found Kyle Warren's remix which had most of what I was looking for, and more importantly, he published stepfiles so I could tweak them further.
His magnet recesses were already a press fit, but I loosened them up slightly because I am printing the bins both in PLA on my Prusas, but also out of ABS using my Voron, and I have found magnet recesses sized for PLA or PETG often are too tight with ABS due to the greater shrinkage of that material. So I split the difference, so that the magnets are not too difficult to press into ABS, but still hold well enough in PLA. If desired you can still add a drop of glue, but it should not be necessary. I also made the recesses deep enough to accept a 6x3 magnet, added back in the center hole (which I guess is for an M3 screw although I have not tried this), and then modified the upper surface to manipulate the slicer into bridging across, and thus printing the holes cleanly.
Kyle's version doesn't have a built in label surface since he also offers a cool snap-in label, which I will also try out eventually. I added in the Freedman style label surface (mine are a hair smaller than Zack's), and the generous fillet at the opposite corner to ease digging hardware out. I also made a version that leaves off the label, but still has one bottom corner with the fillet.
If you like some of these changes but not all of them, I am also uploading the stepfiles so you can tweak them further if you wish. Stepfiles may not technically be source files, but for passing CAD files between users on different software platforms, they are ideal. I also plan to publish different sizes of bins under this model later on as I create them. Both of the initial bins are of the 1x1x6 size.
Update 15AUG23:
Test prints of the previous files fit the magnets fine (of course), but when I started printing the bins in greater quantity, I found a few magnets were too loose in a few holes (the magnets vary a little, so I ran into tolerance stacking). I edited the files to very slightly reduce the diameter of the holes by .05mm, which will hopefully do the trick. I also finished the 1x2x6 versions and added those as well.
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Noncommercial — Share Alike
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