Tresure chest

thingiverse

My OpenSCAD treasure chest project comprises two parts: the box and the lid. The box is hollow, with two solid parts. The lid is a semi-cylinder featuring two hollow sections. I designed it to store extra keys and earphones, as I am highly organized and don't want to lose them; the treasure chest will help me keep things tidy. The box provides a hidden space for extra cash. To create the treasure chest, I started with the box part (the base unit). One requirement was to have a cube and an operation involving sphere, which the hollowed-out box fulfills. The initial scale was 10mm, as 10 is an easy number to work with and later adjust. Another criterion involved a cylinder, the sphere intersection and union operation. I then thought of a lid for my box in the form of a semi-cylinder. I saved my OpenSCAD file with the base and opened a new one. I decided to keep the parts separate to facilitate manipulation of the cylinder. Following steps on the website and the cheatsheet, I created an initial cylinder. By trying different ways of intersecting a cube and a cylinder to create a half-cylinder, I realized this with a quarter-cylinder. The original cylinder was rotated 90 degrees so that the curved part faced upwards. The cube was placed exactly on top of the quarter-cylinder, overlapping. Intersection retained only what had in common, the quarter of the cylinder. I copied this code and made a translation of -50 in the x direction instead of 50. This gave me a half-cylinder. The cube's dimensions were 100x100x100, and the cylinder's height was 100 with a radius of 50, all done through trial and error. Hinges were an afterthought. I had finished both pieces but a friend asked how they would attach. I thought then of simple hinges: a cylinder inside a hollow one. The recessed part was on the lid, and the solid cylinder was on the box. The solid cylinder attached to the box with a stretched cube in the z direction. The recessed cylinder attached with a stretched cube in the x direction. I printed both pieces, but the hinges didn't allow the chest to open properly. I thought about this issue and realized that the recessed parts should have been on the box, not the lid. I made the change, and the box opened, but at a very small scale, just tens of millimeters after printing. A second attempt at a larger scale (the scale shown in the OpenSCAD file) allowed for a better treasure chest to be printed.