Customizable Filament Spool Drawers

thingiverse

This thing does not contain any STL files that can be downloaded and printed directly because you have to customize it to fit your own type of filament spool using OpenSCAD on your own computer. 3D printing has a tendency to generate many empty filament spools. I've always kept the empty spools, hoping that I could someday put them to good use. I recently did some research into what others do with their empty filament spools and was delighted to see them being used for drawer storage units by simply printing drawers that fit into the spools. I always have a shortage of small drawers for electronic components, bolts, nuts, etc. I found many different designs on Thingiverse for spool drawers, but noted that most of these designs were for specific types of empty spools. Besides that, they mostly only give the STL files, so you're stuck with the sizes the author chose for her system. Not wanting to go through them all, trying to find one that will fit my empty spools, and also wanting options to customize the drawer sizes, I settled on a very simplistic, but clever design by keynes87 made in OpenSCAD. Since OpenSCAD has a very useful parametric customizer interface, which is also available on Thingiverse for customizing things, and the fact that I love parametric design, keynes87's design was the perfect candidate to build on. ##### Features * Supply spool dimensions to make drawer sizing and preview easy * Allows 2 to 5 equal sized drawers per layer * Can have 1 or 2 layers, with different drawer heights per layer. * Allows adjusting the drawer wall and bottom thickness * Has an assembly preview option to get an idea of the final assembly. * Can simulate opening one drawer for visual help, or to test clearances - with equal sized drawers, 5 per layer is about as much as is possible before drawers start interfering. * With multi-layer option selected and drawers of different height, both drawers will be drawn in print mode. * Can generate a thin tester outline of the drawer to test fit the spool before final print. * Can generate a template for exact drilling of the hinge holes in the spool. * Color support in assembly mode. keynes87: https://www.thingiverse.com/keynes87 OpenSCAD: http://www.openscad.org/