Chucky

Meet Chucky; he's almost entirely - but not quite - unlike a murderous doll possessed by the soul of someone that made poor life choices. Instead of making his life's mission the ending of your life's missions, his only desire is to keep your drill press chuck key safely contained, protected, and out of the way, yet ready for use at any moment...and he's very good at doing that.

Okay, so here's the lowdown on this little widget: it's a low-profile, movable, magnetic retainer for a drill press chuck key...so if you're like me and have a habit of losing/damaging chuck keys because you "store" them on random surfaces and/or leave them in the chuck in order to surprise your Future Self as they pass your face at sub-orbital velocity, then you may want to consider making one of these. It sticks to pretty much any ferrous object because there's a rather sizable rubber-coated magnet in the base, and it holds a K3-pattern chuck key in the opposite end by way of a stacked set of three 8mm by 2mm magnets. Print it, assemble it, stick it to something vaguely ferrous, snap a chuck into the retaining well, spin the chuck around a few times because playing with your new fidget-spinner is fun, and you're done: one problem solved, 98 to go.

Salient points about various things (including the salient point) are as follows:

• Chucky is sized for a Jacobs K3 chuck; this is an 11-tooth key with a 5/16" pilot shank/salient point, and it interchanges directly with D6 and 3MK2 keys. Chucky may fit other 1/2" to 5/8-ish" keys, but I can't confirm that because I don't have any of those. That being said: please let me know if there's any demand for other key-specific sizes; I don't mind doing a ready-to-print remix/variant of this, so don't hesitate to reach out.

• This requires two different magnets and a single M4 by 8mm flathead screw (standard 82° countersink) to assemble . The base magnet is a generic 1.25" by .25" rubber-coated model with an M4 thread, and the chuck-retaining magnets are 8mm by 2mm; literally none of those dimensions are accurate to the units in reality, but if you follow the provided links at the bottom of the page you'll get good results on all fronts.

• Chucky's conical profile makes him easy to keep clean: most of the chips and murder confetti just fall off the smooth exterior instead of winding up between the teeth of the key because you left it laying on the drill press table again...but this profile also makes him hard to reposition unless you know how to do it easily. The secret it this: just leave the chuck key in place and use it to pry him off of whatever he's attached to.

• Once the body is printed you have exactly ONE chance for correct assembly; the base magnet is screwed into the body, but then the chuck-retainer magnets are pressed in over the screw, occluding it and preventing the screw and the base magnet from being removed. It's no big deal if you mess this up, because the price of failure is rescuing your trapped magnets by crushing the printed body with a hammer and trying again...and that's kind of a win-win when you think about it.

Note: buy-in on rubber-coated magnets can be steep since they're about US$2.25 each and they usually come in multi-packs...but if you're on a spree of making hooks and hangers and widgets and junk and stuff, you'll use them up pretty quickly. Just make sure that whatever you get has an actual diameter of no more than 1.22", and a thickness of somewhere around .245".

As always: if you find something useful or inspirational, leave a comment, post a make, and try to tip your designers whenever possible. Even the smallest bits of support make a big difference to independent creators.