X-Wing Separatist Blanks

thingiverse

These are blanks for X-Wing Separatist ships that can be used with bintools.scad to generate Harbor Freight storage bins. I included the blanks for all the ships that I own personally, so the newest wave are not here yet. You should easily be able to use this to create bins for Stanley or any storage box really by just adjusting the dimensions of the bins being generated. In fact, I generally created my bins to be of different heights, commonly thirds, that would allow me to stack things and maximize my storage space. I will be posting other things with the bins that I have created personally. I have also done all of the same work for some of the Republic ships, and will post those separately as well. I also created blanks for the Republic ships that I own. Here is the link. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4792317/files I created all of these blanks using this process in case anyone wants to make blanks of other ships, or just do a better one of mine. I didn't come up with this process, I pieced it together from explanations I found online. It didn't all come from one place, but I'm sure someone out there can explain it better than I will. This process looks long, but once I got familiar with the workflow, I was able to create a blank in about 30 minutes. Anyway, here is what I did. 1. Hand sketch the outline of the ship on paper top down 2. Hand sketch the outline of the ship on paper from the side - I'm considering doing a front/back view for a couple ships for added stability. 3. Scan/Document Camera the sketch to get a jpeg 4. Open the jpeg with Gimp/Photoshop 5. Use paintbrush/pencil/etc to fill in the outline in black getting as close to the outline as you can while keeping smooth edges. Use whatever tools you want really, just get a nice sharp outline all filled in. - For many of the sketches, I did half of the outline and then mirrored it to create a perfectly symmetric outline. 6. Select the black section, then invert selection to select everything in the image that is not the solid outline of the ship and delete/convert to transparent. This leaves just the solid blank outline of the ship and everything else transparent. - For the side view, I often just created a large rectangle on the top of the shape instead of following the top edge of the ship. This creates a blank that has a solid top that will go all the way up and end completely flat. I don't think this is actually required for bintools to keep the top of the blank open, but I did it anyway just to be sure. Also, because it made it just a little less work than trying to follow the top edge with the paintbrush (why make it harder than it needs to be?). 7. Shrink the canvas size to fit the outline - This is kind of important because otherwise it makes the image file size larger and tinkercad will pitch a fit about the file size being too big. 8. Export as png 9. Open the png with Inkscape. Click the image, then use Path --> Trace Bitmap. Move the generated graphic over and delete the old image. Move the new generated image back to the center of the canvas. - This will give you an svg outline of both top and side views of the ship, and will have maintained the ratios of the shapes, curves, edges needed in order to create the blank. 10. Save as svg file. 11. Import the svg file for the top view and side view in Thinkercad 12. Measure the ships height and width with a Caliper or a ruler. - Use these measurements to adjust the height and width of each of the imported shapes. - I started by use the shift and dragging the corner to get the dimensions generally close, and then changed the height and width from there in small increments. However, I found that the relative ratios of the original imported images were good enough that I could probably have just changed the heights and widths to the measured values and it would have worked just fine anyway. - Make sure that the matching dimensions are identical between the two shapes. That is, make sure that the lengths, widths, and heights that you decide on are the same, so that the shapes will line up in the end. 13. Rotate the imported side view to be the correct orientation 14. Extrude both shapes in the required direction so that both solids have the same dimensions. 15. Create an Intersection of the two shapes. This is your blank. I will explain this next, since tinkercad does not have an intersection function. 16. Flip the blank over (rotate 180deg) and add a cylinder for the post of the ship. - Use your caliper or ruler to measure where it goes, and place it at that location. I found that a cylinder of diameter 8mm was pretty good. 17. Make sure that you flipped the blank over in the last step because bintools is set up to use the blank like this and export the thing as an stl file. Now, to create an intersection in tinkercad I suggest doing a Google Search. There are videos that will explain the process pretty well. Since my solids were designed to be the same dimensions, I didn't both with using the align tools or anything, I just dropped the ruler on the workspace and then set the x/y coordinates of my shapes to be the same location. I really suggest watching a video on this, but the basic steps are like this. 1. Make copies of each shape, and put the two copies at the same coordinates. Then set one as a hole and the other as a solid and do a union. 2. Do the same thing as step one with the hole and solid switched. This gives you two shapes that are the pieces of the solids that stick out from one of the two original solids when they are unioned together. 3. Make another copy of each of your original solids, place them at the same coordinates and do a union with both of them as solids. 4. Take the shapes created in step 1 and 2 and change them to holes. Place them each, one at a time, at the same coordinates as the unioned shape created an step 3 and union them with the shape from step 3. 5. Once you have finished that, the two hole shapes will have cut off all the parts that stick out and you will be left with the intersection of the two shapes. 6. Sometimes I found that there would be tiny edges that don't quite get cut off due to math round off error when creating all the shapes. Since each of the shapes actually cuts off the extraneous part in only one dimension, either side view or top view, you can create another of the hole shape and just slide it a bit and union it again to get rid of any little extra bits. As far as bintools goes, I copied and edited an existing function to create one of my own that would allow me to generate individual holders for the ships rather than relying on the children() function. I found it easier to design bins that hold multiple ships using this method than using children(). This also means that you can just pick the bin size that you want, then create as many holder as you want and then rotate them all around and place them where you want them while easily looking at the coordinates at the same time. I left all the code for the bins that I have created in the generator file, and just block commented each bin out and added a comment about what bin that creates. Hopefully this should give enough examples that anyone can copy paste things around and create whatever they want. I'm not an expert with openscad by any means, and I mostly relied on my C++ background to do all this. My hope though is that others with a little programming knowledge will have an easier time using what I created than having to learn about openscad in order to use this.