BoostAddiction
Well-known member
I don't mean "stupid wrenches", though I may have called them that at one time.
No, I mean that the usual storage schemes for wrenches are all oriented in the horizontal plane, wasting all the volume above it. If you have a lot of wrenches- and I think we can all agree here that a real man can't have too many- you generally end up wasting all that space above the typical wrench rack. And a lot of racks use up a lot of area in a drawer that isn't used. So they really aren't a very dense way to store wrenches, wasting both area and volume.
Worse, those wrench racks will have empty spaces unless you have the exact number of whatever sizes the holders have. And that seriously offends my aesthetics.
So I thought about it, and whipped up a model in Fusion 360, a popular, powerful (and free) CAD program. This novel design offers relatively high density, depending on the number of wrenches you have in each size, and because they are 3D printed, can be made in exactly the height, color and quantity needed. For example, I could print all the SAE wrenches in red, and the metrics in gray (or black).
I put the wrench size on the top for easy ID. Eventually, I'll paint the top with a contrasting color paint, and wipe it off the top, so the remaining paint stays in the printed recesses.
This is just a quickly printed model to validate the concept and size. Production holders would be printed in a high-quality mode with much better resolution.
Here's a view of the holder in a regular 4+" drawer, showing that most of the volume is used in an area as small as I could make it. Not every holder has almost 4" of vertical wrenches, but it shows how you could stack them that way.
Here's another view:
I really like the concept, and now that the initial concept seems to work, I will design and print the other sizes, using high-quality mode, and in the colors I choose.
For the technical types, this was printed using Hatchbox Pantone 032 red PLA, on a modified Wanhao I3 Plus, using Duet 32-bit electronics at 60mm/sec, 25% infill, no raft and 200 degrees at the hot end, and 60 on the Buildtak bed.
No, I mean that the usual storage schemes for wrenches are all oriented in the horizontal plane, wasting all the volume above it. If you have a lot of wrenches- and I think we can all agree here that a real man can't have too many- you generally end up wasting all that space above the typical wrench rack. And a lot of racks use up a lot of area in a drawer that isn't used. So they really aren't a very dense way to store wrenches, wasting both area and volume.
Worse, those wrench racks will have empty spaces unless you have the exact number of whatever sizes the holders have. And that seriously offends my aesthetics.
So I thought about it, and whipped up a model in Fusion 360, a popular, powerful (and free) CAD program. This novel design offers relatively high density, depending on the number of wrenches you have in each size, and because they are 3D printed, can be made in exactly the height, color and quantity needed. For example, I could print all the SAE wrenches in red, and the metrics in gray (or black).
I put the wrench size on the top for easy ID. Eventually, I'll paint the top with a contrasting color paint, and wipe it off the top, so the remaining paint stays in the printed recesses.
This is just a quickly printed model to validate the concept and size. Production holders would be printed in a high-quality mode with much better resolution.
Here's a view of the holder in a regular 4+" drawer, showing that most of the volume is used in an area as small as I could make it. Not every holder has almost 4" of vertical wrenches, but it shows how you could stack them that way.
Here's another view:
I really like the concept, and now that the initial concept seems to work, I will design and print the other sizes, using high-quality mode, and in the colors I choose.
For the technical types, this was printed using Hatchbox Pantone 032 red PLA, on a modified Wanhao I3 Plus, using Duet 32-bit electronics at 60mm/sec, 25% infill, no raft and 200 degrees at the hot end, and 60 on the Buildtak bed.
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