Small Cup Rack, Customizable

This simple design provides compact storage and dispensing of small, single-use measuring and mixing cups and jars, as well as a variety of similar containers. Such mixing cups and jars are often used in hobbies for mixing paint colors, or multi-part glue (like epoxy), etc. Coffee pods, Medicine dosage cups and bathroom cups are also options.

Only the base of the rack is 3D printed; using heavy wire for the upper rack arms allows me to make the rack taller than I could make on my printer using one printed part. Wire also reduces filament usage, and greatly shortens print time. I use 12 gauge galvanized wire (available in 50 ft. rolls at hardware stores), but the provided source file easily supports other wire sizes (see Customization section below).

The most useful feature of this design is the ease of customizing the base for your own size cups or containers. The source file is included here, and all dimensions of the base are keyed to one value, the diameter of the largest part of your container. This value can be easily set in one cell of a spreadsheet, built in to the source file. So, you can create a custom-sized base, with the wire holes properly spaced, by just changing one value in the source file (using FreeCAD), as described in the Customization section below. The wire diameter is also set in the same spreadsheet, so you can customize the wire size easily also.

The .STL files included here are only examples of what I've generated from the same source file, by modifying only the "Cup Diameter" field in the source file. The STL file names include the cup diameter (mm). For reference, here are other dimensions of the prints generated by the STL files included:

File Name	Examples	Wire Bend Length	Base L x W mm
CupRackBase-42mm	Smaller Jelly Jar (no photo)	35.3 mm	90.0 x 52.0
CupRackBase-46mm	Mixing Cups, Jelly Jars	38.4 mm	98.0 x 56.0
CupRackBase-51mm	K-Cup Coffee Pods	42.2 mm	107.6 x 60.8
CupRackBase-58mm	Bathroom Cups, Medicine	47.8 mm	122.0 x 68.0