4x5 Wet/Dry Plate Storage Box

thingiverse

This is a simple storage box for 4x5" photographic plates. It holds 47 plates, and it can accommodate anywhere from tintypes on thin trophy aluminum up to pretty thick glass 1/8" or less (I've verified that it fits the thickest glass I have for black glass ambrotypes). Thin plates will lean back a bit, so if you have a mix of both you may want to insert tintypes from one side and glass plates from the other. I used Ponoko to cut the pieces for the box itself, and it all fits on one P3 sized sheet of .125" MDF. The walls of the box glue to the bottom in the obvious way, and the four L-shaped pieces should be glued to the bottom of the lid inside the engraved outline to keep the lid from sliding off the top. Note that before submitting for cutting to Ponoko you'll want to (a) change the text and font to your liking, (b) convert all text to paths, and (c) change the stroke width of all the cutting lines to 0.01mm. You may want to remove the numeric labels from one or both sides of the box (I removed them from the right side) because they add quite a bit to the making fees. The blender files are the source for the rack in the bottom, one being the whole 12" long rack and the other being the rack split into two 6" long pieces for printing individually. The STL files include the whole rack, one of the two split pieces side by side, and one of each of the individual pieces if you can't fit both at once on your bed. When assembling the box, the alignment tabs on the rack should align perfectly with the holes in the side walls of the box. Make sure the rack is seated before gluing the box together, as it will be impossible to get it in afterwards. I had originally intended to glue the two pieces of the rack together, but once I actually got all the pieces I found that the alignment tabs alone do a perfectly good job of keeping the pieces of the rack pushed together and held down to the bottom of the box. One word of caution about all this: I can't guarantee that the rack won't scratch your plates, depending on your filament and printer settings. You'll definitely want to make sure you get as clean a print as possible, little bits of plastic sticking out towards the front of your plates will be bad news. I did try to keep the separators as low and close to the edges as I could to minimize the risk of scratching while ensuring it would still hold plates.