Kinematic Case

Hey there, wonderful people!

I love mechanical linkages and things that move things that move other things!  Push that bar at the front and the lid flips open, driven by two-piece lever arms and a bunch of swivel points!

Sometimes things do roughly work out as planned, and I did embark on this intending to make something with chunky exterior linkages.  Much of the process involved me sticking my tongue out the side of my mouth while drawing curves and working out where things would have to attach to each other so that nothing would get jammed up as things lifted and rotated.  And, of course, the whole thing needed to maintain angles that would work for printing upside-down, for print-in-placeability :D

Once the core of the design was in place, it spontaneously gathered struts for keeping the arms neatly aligned through the range of motion.  It also gathered a bunch of hexagons and angular bits just because I like hexagons and angular bits!

I did orginally consider putting magnets in the linkages so that the lid would stay open, but it did eventually occur to me that just having it open to a point where gravity no longer pulled it closed would work far better, so I did that instead :)

Print Description

This is an articulated model, so make sure your bottom layer is nice and neat, especially since that's going to be the top of the model when it's complete.  You'll also want to ensure there aren't any printing issues like stringing or overextrusion that might hinder moving parts from moving freely.

Print Dimensions

It's not small!  The Kinematic Case occupies 206mm x 152mm on the print bed and is 178mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

While not designed for scaling, the tolerances are generous as usual, so you can probably scale this down quite a bit with care!  I printed a 60% version using default settings and had no problems at all.  Given that it's already quite large, it'll scale up quite a bit too before things start to get too loose!

Print Orientation

As you've probably worked out from those gradient lines, the Kinematic Case prints lid-down.

Further Thoughts

My good friend Courtney at Filament Stories expended large amounts of filament test printing this thing, and commented that it looked like the detail on the back was made for wall mounting the box.  This also made sense since the lid rotates within the body of the box, rather than flipping out the back.  So I made some wall mounts!

There are two versions, depending how secure you want things to be, and they have 5mm countersunk holes.  The frame on the double bracket is really just for spacing the two mounting points precisely.

Happy mechanical levering!

xoxo

Sven.

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533 Kinematic Case