Quarter Cup Measuring Cup for Polypropylene Printing

thingiverse

This is a simple 1/4 cup measuring cup that I designed in FreeCAD. I copied the material thicknesses from an actual plastic 1/4 cup measuring cup that was injection-molded from polypropylene. This means that it should be sufficiently stiff to work when 3D-printed using polypropylene filament. As a material, polypropylene (PP) has numerous virtues that make it pretty nice to use. It's dishwasher safe and can hold boiling water (while my dishwasher easily melted a PETG model) as well as being completely immune to acetone, hydrofluoric acid, sodium hydroxide, and many organic solvents. As a bonus, it's light enough to float on water, and it absorbs no water, so you don't have to store it in a box with silica gel or dry it in the oven. However, PP's main issue is its low stiffness, which can be good sometimes (living hinges can be made as it's almost impossible to crease PP), but most prints are designed for stiff filaments like PLA. This model is therefore designed to be much stiffer than other measuring cup models on Thingiverse. You could print this out of any desirable material that isn't particularly stiff (like fake polycarbonate filaments) but PP is the obvious choice because it's cheap, food-safe, dishwasher-safe, and chemical resistant, which is perfect for measuring cups. Obviously, if you wanted to print this out of PLA or PETG, you can do that, and it will work, but be warned that both of those types of plastic will warp or melt in the heat of a dishwasher.