Solid/holed sealable holder - OpenSCAD parametric

prusaprinters

<h3>Features</h3><ul><li>Fully parametric round or n-gonal container.&nbsp;</li><li>Walls and cover top can be either solid, with square holes, or with straight triangle holes.</li><li>Can add an inner "brim" or "overhang", which in turn allows the use of a flexible sealing gasket.</li><li>Closes with a twist-lock mechanism (righty tighty, lefty loosey), with one or more pairs of pins, or with a friction fit cover or plug.</li><li>Allows for the creation of inserts or dividers that can also fit and close with the cover.</li><li>Cover optional, allowing for the creation of baskets, pen holders…</li><li>Modifiable preset file included.</li><li>The customizer app outputs the real capacity of the holder, excluding the cover, and an approximate equivalent in dry silica gel grams.</li><li>Full-fledged PDF instructions, both for the general use of the OpenSCAD customizer, and for this specific model.</li></ul><p><i>Note: If you're looking for a sturdy round box that can lock securely and hold delicate objects, check out my </i><a href="https://www.printables.com/model/251002-protective-lens-case"><i>Protective lens case</i></a><i>, with a TPU padded insert.</i></p><h3>Included STLs</h3><p>The premade stls included are:</p><ul><li>&nbsp;A version that will fit most spools (52mm mounting hole) in three heights: 50mm (for shorter spools like Alpaplastic 160 series), 55 mm (for 750 g spools like Alpaplastic RS200KS), and 68mm (for 1kg spools like Aplaplastic RS200GD or Prusament). Options for solid container with sealing gasket.</li><li>Example specimens for a friction-fit closed hexagonal holder (with 3 separators), a long stylish pen or holed box (with optional 3-compartment, bottomless divider, twist-lock), an octogonal 4-compartment basket, and a square stylized holder.</li></ul><h3>Other notes</h3><p>Some other issues to be aware of.</p><h4>The Recymbol library</h4><p>For the full functionality of this model, it's better to have installed the Recymbol library v1.1 or higher. The library is not required for the model itself, which will run fine (just throwing some noncritical errors) in case the library is not installed.</p><p>To install the library, download <a href="https://www.printables.com/model/136201-recymbol-customizable-recycling-symbols-and-librar">the file library.scad here at Printables</a> and put it in a folder called Recymbol in your OpenSCAD library folder (go to OpenSCAD menu File→Show Library folder). That's all.</p><h4>The Print-on-print technique</h4><p>This technique, invented AFAIK by Devin Montes of the MakeAnything YouTube channel, allows the users of single-extruder, single-material machines to use several colors in the same layer for the first layers only (we use just two, up to 0.4mm), and is used in one of the multiple styles for the recycling symbol.</p><p>The procedure is pretty simple. First, you slice and print the insert(s); in this case, the symbol. Then you remove the purge line and skirt, and print over that first print the 2nd (or nth) object. You can set all objects in PrusaSlicer, for instance, and go over the “Printable” toggle (the eye icon in the object list) to export each one, ensuring that they fit nicely.&nbsp;</p><p>The models generated for print-on-print with this customizer have a bit of clearance (or offset) in the negative part, to avoid smearing. This results in a very neat, clearly readable, recycling symbol.</p><p>The customizer can also generate models for MMU, without this clearance. Not having an MMU myself, I cannot guarantee that they will work perfectly (they are untested), but there are users that have done this procedure of removing the clearance and got impeccable results with their machines, meaning that this <i>should</i> work. If you encounter any problem with this (or any other feature of the model, FWIW), leave a comment and I'll do my best to solve it.</p><h4>Support, materials and printing tips</h4><p>The holes are rotated squares, so they're at a 45-degree angle and thus, at least at first, don't require supports. The “strong” variant, with triangles, may test the bridging abilities of your printer, but those are intended to be used with small-ish holes, and act more as a reinforcement than a strictly-printed feature, so you should be OK also.</p><p>The only issues that may present are in some edge cases, namely bases with big holes and very few sides (the “Precision” parameter), like the example square, hexagonal and octagonal base. In these cases, you'll need to support half of the top vertices, the ones that are obviously floating on air.</p><p>I thought about adding some 3mf pre-supported files, but testing showed that it's far faster and easier to use the paint-on supports feature in PrusaSlicer and enabling support for support enforcers only, than loading the 3mf and updating all the layer height, machine and filament configurations. All you need is, at most, four strokes and a couple of model-turning, and you're all good to go!</p><p>Note that the holed holders with thin walls can be quite a torture test for your printer. Expect for sure some stringing, especially with small holes —as the string will be carried as a bridge, rather than a string. This is more a feature than a bug if you plan to use this as a dessicant holder, as this additional string will prevent the smaller beads from escaping the holder! If you want an object more for aesthetic purposes, think about doing thick walls, big holes and a noticeable hole separation, which will make the stringing weaker and easier to remove. Using something like a heat gun on a model like the desiccant holder STLs is more likely to deform the model than effectively removing the stringing.</p><p>There are not many special requirements material-wise; but may be worth noting that Stefan from CNC Kitchen tested the heat resistance of polypropylene (specifically, FormFutura's Centaur) and found out that it resists 100ºC or more pretty well; it sure softens, but not enough to deform substantially (definitely won't “melt”), so if you've got some to spare it's a nice solution to have a oven-safe holder that can withstand the refreshing process of silica gel (activated alumina and molecular sieve are something quite different, though).</p><p>For all other issues, please refer to the enclosed instructions first. They're long, detailed, and have puns and bad jokes all scattered around them, but at some point they talk about kitties.</p>