Silica Gel Container Funnel

thingiverse

I printed out several of the Inside Spool Silica Gel Containers but needed a way to get the loose silica beads into the container without making too much of a mess. A funnel would be perfect, but I didn't want to use my kitchen funnels. This funnel has a nozzle OD of 30mm and a cup OD of 100mm, so it should fit any container with an opening between 31mm and 99mm. So, I grabbed my calipers and fired up FreeCAD. I modeled this funnel after canning funnels and even gave it a small handle with a hanging hook. I've included my FreeCAD file if anyone wants to see my poor FreeCAD skills. Note that I'm using the 0.18 beta versions so have used diameter constraints. If you load this into 0.17 or earlier, the two elements in the handle should still be the right size, but the sketch won't be fully constrained. It is fully constrained in 0.18. My pictures are of my first STL export and is a little more faceted than I wanted. While I printing the funnel, I (finally) discovered how to increase the tessellation for the FreeCAD .stl export. This is the version of the .stl that is included here. I sliced this with Slic3rPE 1.42.0_alpha5 and saved the platform out as the .3mf file. I don't guarantee that the .3mf file will load properly in anything but Slic3rPE 1.42+. I also have the 7x7 mesh measuring firmware installed, so I have no idea if the "G80 N7" in the custom start gcode will work on official Prusa firmware. If you are using my provided .3mf file in Slic3rPE for your i3 MK3, you may need to remove the "N7" from the G80 line. I recently re-printed in NinjaFlex and this seems to work better for silica gel. The gel bounces out of the PLA funnel but the elasticity of the NinjaFlex funnel doesn't let the gel bounce. 2019-10-18 - I added a STEP file to make remixing outside of FreeCAD easier, and updated the .3mf file for my NinjaFlex 85A profile and Printer file for flexibles using PrusaSlicer v2.1.0. I could probably make my profiles for NinjaFlex better now that PrusaSlicer has filament profile overrides for retraction.