Tower of Art

thingiverse

I have 17/18ml dropper style paint bottles from Army Painter, Vallejo, Reaper MSP, and others, and I needed a way to store them that didn't take up too much space on my desk or floor. I also happened to find a cardboard tube of the type used when casting concrete pillars. The tube has an inner diameter of 150mm, and 4mm wall thickness, so I based this project off those measurements. The trays are stackable, and can hold up to 19 bottles each. They consist of three parts: the 'holder', the bottom, and the optional stiffener. The holder and bottom parts are upside down in the STLs to make printing easier. Print as many as needed, glue them together, fill them with bottles, and stack them on top of each other. Then slide the cardboard tube down over them. Endcaps... You need two, and a cargo strap not to fit in the groove. Note that the caps have an outer diameter of 10mm more than the outer diameter of your tube. This is the widest object and sets the requirements for your build area. There's also the '17ml', which doubles as a paint holder. That one is kind of a long print, though. But you only need one of those if you decide to use that design. You can store differently-sized bottles, tubes, or whatever in this. Just make certain that the 'Bottom' part is sized to fit the item in the layer underneath. Added files for 2ml, 16mm diameter glass bottles often used for perfume or essential oil samples. The holder file is way larger than necessary right now. Still need to clean up some of the code... a lot! Started parameterizing the files. First out is the simple endcap as this is the potentially most useful part. With a pair of it and a strap, any tube can be converted into some sort of transport or storage container. Still to finish: endcap that doubles as a holder, the 'Bottom' part, and the optional stiffener. And any extras I may think of. Added a 'hex' endcap. Just because I could and because it looks cool... The file now contains all essential modules: Simple endcap, hex endcap, and holder endcap Holder, Bottom plate, and the optional Support Plate (to be glued in if you feel it necessary) 1.32 is the latest version. 1.31 was a test version. You can use any version of this code that you like. The Bottle Columns module draws a hexagon to determine how many bottles will fit along one edge or from a corner to the center. A '1' means one bottle, a '2' means three rows of bottles, and so on. Holder Endcap: This one uses the Holder Height parameter! This module will be holder height + 5mm thick. 5mm was chosen to give a proper clearance for the cargo strap groove. Incidentally, the groove around the edge, for the tube is also 5mm deep, so setting Holder height to 0 will break this part something serious. Tips: Some items you don't want to have rattling around too much. Consider defining the holder with slightly oversized holes and gluing in padding. Experiment with the Plate Thickness setting. It defaults to 2mm. But for test tubes for example, it could be set to 25mm, the height to be the length or the tube -10mm or so, and printed with thick walls and 5% infill. Or you can add 'stiffeners' to the top modules. Some smaller sample tubes (plastic 1 and 2ml tubes come to mind) narrows down to the end. Then you may define two different 'top' modules to glue together.