Gridfinity Tips: 3D Printing Your New Workshop Organization System

so it's been a few months since the lovably bizarre youtuber zack friedman released his gridfinity organization system and i don't know about you but as you can see looking around here i've been hard at work grid finitifying my entire life and in this video i want to share with you some of the tips tricks and words of wisdom that i've come up with after hundreds of hours and kilos of filament devoted to this lofty project tip number zero the magic of open source community variety and innovation so i'm going to get into the real tips and tricks in just a second but first i want to point out that gridfinity isn't just a standard for creating organizers it's an open source standard and one that already has a community developing around it for those of you who aren't in the know a few months ago zack friedman released the awesomely open source gridfinity system a pretty baldy move considering that he was effectively building upon alexander chapel's closed source paid a download system and turning it into an open source one that anyone can use and build upon for free kudos to you zack i love alexander's work and i'm a big fan of his videos but i have to say that within a few hours of zack releasing his own files open source it really became a case study in the benefits of open sourcing your project whereas alex's community had to wait patiently for alex to release even new box sizes or suffer for months or years with design decisions that alex made to suit his own workshop such as non-square dimensions within hours an entire grassroots community had sprung up around gridfinity including a discord community a rich library on thangs and a subreddit and much much more zach himself even did a follow-up video showcasing some of the best designs created by the community including many that far improved upon even his own wildly creative and sometimes scary imagination in short in just a few hours this open source version of alex's idea far surpassed two plus years of alex's own innovation and we're just getting started now that's not an indictment on alex in any way frankly he's more of a manly man engineer maker and videographer than i'll ever be it's just a simple fact a thousand brains are better than one brain no matter how charmingly swiss that brain may be so on that note tip 0 if you'll indulge me is to make sure that you join the community on reddit and discord because there are a lot of folks out there who can help you with your own designs and i'm sure that you have a lot to contribute currently some of us are planning out a more organized directory for finding gridfinity parts on the new community-led gridfinity.xyz but there's a lot of other ways to help which leads me to tip one generate your own empty bins okay no more quasi-tip foreplay let's get to the penetr one of the really cool things about grinfinity being so open source is that we don't have to wait for alex zack or anyone else to create new designs if we need them in fact we don't even have to design them ourselves because believe it or not there are already multiple different resources and files available for you to generate your very own empty bins even if you have no discernible design skills whatsoever of course even in his original video zack pointed out that his designs are fully parametric meaning that you can modify them right in fusion 360 which you can download for free if you're a maker and yes that is true however i found that the fusion 360 version was lacking some capabilities such as the ability to remove the label without knowing how to navigate the editing functions of f360 and i'm not a real maker so i have no fusion skills fortunately a user named simply jamie over at printables went ahead and converted gridfinity into an open scaled library allowing you to generate bins base plates and much much more right in the openscad software for those of us who aren't super comfortable with fusion360 or who are just lazy also me this is awesome because it means that you just need to edit a few parameters and you're able to generate any kind of box or base plate your little heart desires at least for the basic ones initially i had some issues with the top layers but jamie has been really really quick and responsive in improving the files and updating them on github and on printables so if you aren't seeing the sizes that you want go ahead and check out this incredible resource tip two create your own custom bins okay that's cool but what if you don't want just another empty bin i mean after all the magic of gridfinity lies in the idea that it isn't just about storing more stuff it's about displaying your stuff in the most efficient manner possible so you can get more projects done and sure while there are tons of designs being uploaded every single day for an increasing number of tools glue sticks doodads and thingamajiggers you're almost certain to have some tools that nobody else in the gridfinity ecosystem has fortunately jdx over at printables has you covered jdx went ahead and uploaded a library of filled in gridfinity boxes for your customization needs uh what good is a filled in box you ask great question you see with a filled in box all you need to do to customize is create a cutout in the shape of whatever you want effectively you need to draw out the tool that you want to use in the gridfinity box and then use a boolean modifier in blender or similar functionality in another software to subtract away that shape from the filled in box heck you might even get lucky and find that someone else has already created a model of your tool but remember to beef up the dimensions a little bit because you don't want it to be an exact fit in your gridfinity box by the way if you want to see an example of this method in action make sure to check out this nifty live flat caliper holder that i made based on jadex's files because unlike the dozen or so caliper bins available it fits in a drawer but also stands the caliper on its side taking up half as much space as if it were laying flat it also puts the caliper at a gentle angle making it more convenient to pull out and no i didn't just melt a hole in the bottom of mine with a lighter because my prototype didn't fit and i didn't want to waste any more filament tip 3 nozzle diameter originally zach recommended using a 0.6 nozzle or smaller probably because that's what all the trendy cool kids are doing after thomas sanlandan danderer effectively canceled 0.4 millimeter nozzles a few weeks ago however many in the community myself included have actually had great results using as high as 0.8 millimeter nozzles as long as we use the newer arachne perimeter generation feature of cura or prusa slicer alpha 2.5 now in case you don't know arachne does a much better job of dealing with thin perimeters by adapting the extrusion mid print making it great for thin walled prints like the bins of grimfinity and of course a bigger nozzle means that you can print more gridfinity containers faster especially if you print at 0.4 millimeter layer heights like i've been doing now while it is possible to print with a bigger nozzle and a higher layer height i do want to warn you of a few important things first because grinfinity bins have a lot of large flat surfaces especially as you get bigger and bigger you need to be particularly careful about your infill and layers initially i figured that i'd go as low as possible with the infill since the parts don't need all that much strength but that was a big flat misshapen mistake what ended up happening was that my first infill layer would warp and do all kinds of weird stuff curling upwards and getting caught on the print head and that led to in the best case awful surface finishes and in the worst case massive step skipping that caused entire prints to fail the fix for this was actually just to increase infill to 15 in order to help that first top layer lay down buttery smooth which leads me to my second tip within a tip don't focus on the numbers here for the first honestly 70 of the boxes i printed i was using way too many layers for the top and bottom i think it's because i'm so used to printing with 0.2 millimeter layer heights that i didn't really stop and think anything of it to see three and four layer settings for each of these but then i took the boxes off the printers and they had heft like serious heft oh and i started running out of spools of filament it's only then that i did the math and realized that between four bottom layers and four top layers i was basically printing with 3.2 millimeters of solid plastic for the part of the boxes that doesn't need any strength at all so as you're increasing infill to 15 i recommend decreasing the top and bottom layers to two maximum three your pocketbook will thank me tip number four some like it hot gridfini d is one of them personally i'm one of those don't print it hotter than you need it types of guys and i generally find myself printing pla at 190 degrees in order to keep it from stringing however there is a strong case for printing these bins much hotter than you are used to first there's the issue of using a bigger nozzle which means more filament flowing through in less time which means you'll want more heat to ensure that you fully melt the filament i found the most success at the top of the range 220 degrees and i lost a good few hundred grams of filament to lower temps additionally there's layer adhesion which i'll talk about more in a second but for now i'll do what all lazy pseudoscientists do and refer you to someone else who actually puts in the effort to do his own research stefan over at cnc kitchen has done some great and awesome experiments to determine the best layer adhesion temperatures for pla and he's found that up to a certain temperature higher temps in the range of 215 degrees plus do lead to better layer adhesion but what about stringing you ask well first of all gridfinity bins are not that intricate and for the most part a bit of stringing is much better than bins that fall apart what's more you can usually get rid of that stringing with a hair dryer or just ignore it because it won't interfere with the usability of the bins unlike layer separation tip 5 filament i don't know about you guys but whenever i see a big project like gridfinity where print quality isn't going to be all that important i immediately think to myself yes a chance to finally use up all that crappy filament i would never use for a paying client hold your horses sally while gridfinity is not that taxing on your printer there are a few things that are cause for concern and which ultimately led to me wasting well over a kilo of filament trying to print and reprint bins first and foremost there's the problem i mentioned just a moment ago layer adhesion you see because some parts of our bins will have just one layer when printed with a 0.8 millimeter nozzle it's important that we use filament that has no layer adhesion issues i had two different filaments which i knew to be problematic and upon pulling the bins off the build plate the layers separated faster than a celebrity couple for some filaments you'll be able to resolve this by upping the heat or decreasing the fan speed but for others it's just not going to work and you'll need to save this for a print where layer adhesion is less of a deal breaker you definitely don't want those layers to separate when you're lifting a bin full of a hundred tiny little screws over a nice thick carpet next up there's bed adhesion as zach mentioned bigger boxes can get warpy and this can lead to your bins not sitting nicely inside the grids or your grids not sitting great at all most of this can be resolved with the classic pla solutions glue sticks turning down the fan and an enclosure but i strongly recommend you have these things dialed in before printing bigger bins because unlike most pla prints using a brim is just not practical for a print like a gridfinity bin and removing that skirt would just be a nightmare on something like this what's more i also had a few rolls of filament that no matter what no matter the temperature insisted on clogging up with all the retractions necessary to print the base plates leading to tons of wasted filament and a lot of frustration as i waited to have enough baseplates to start organizing all my crap ultimately i'll say that although gridfinity seems like a great way to use up crappy filament truthfully i found that it's better to just commit to buying more of the good stuff i mean the entire gridfinity organization system is free and open source so what's 20 or 50 on filament side note i've had the most luck with the really affordable overture pla that you can find on amazon not their pro version but just the regular one or even the eco pla that you can get for 17.99 right now and i'd appreciate it if you use my referral link in the description to help support the channel tip 6 analysis paralysis in his video zack jokes around that he has adhd 4k 120 fps well i like many of you have ocd 8k 1gbps so zax don't worry about analysis paralysis just print it again if you change your mind did a little to comfort my ocd brain i thought about all the different sorts of ways to color code my bins and even tried to plan a roy g biv rainbow vibe only to realize that the modularity of this system made it inevitable that it would end up looking like my toddler's puke after halloween so instead i decided to go with a theme-based color scheme using a specific color for each type of tool in my gridfinity system you see part of the beauty of gridfinity is that the bins are modular and can be taken out and moved and reorganized so there's no guarantee that you'll want to put them back in the same place every time maybe while working on a woodworking project you want specific tools closer to the forefront or maybe after a particular scolding from your wife or significant other you've decided to cool it on the real man tools and put the collets further back in the drawer to save money on a divorce the point is if you set colors based on the type of tool you'll not only avoid going bat every time you see out of order color schemes but also you'll be able to find tools faster and easier because you'll know what color you should be looking for even if your eyes are full of acetone fumes and sawdust you could for example go with purple heating tools blue squirty stuffs green pointy boys yellow these nuts orange these bolts red things that go bump in the day yes i know that that list was still in color coordinated order no i'm not sorry yes i made up things that go bump in the day and no i'm not going to explain the logic because of course each gridfinity setup is as unique illogical and nerdy as its owner make it your own nobody else needs to understand your logic just tell them to appreciate the pretty colors art is in the eye of the beholder by the way speaking of art or attempts at making it if you're enjoying this video and want to see me try and make more of them instead of giving up like 99.9 of your new youtube channels the best way to do so is to subscribe and leave a comment below on another topic you'd like to see i honestly have no shortage of ideas for creating more videos the only thing stopping me is i'm not sure anyone else out there wants to see them so let me know i'm not completely crazy by subscribing tip number seven size isn't everything personally i was initially motivated to print as big of a base plate as i could on my cr-10 and then print the smaller ones to fit the remaining nooks and crannies but in the end i actually wish that i'd gone smaller for two reasons one is that i had some serious issues with nozzles clogging on specific filaments like i mentioned before the biggest base plates were seven by sevens or something like that and i would waste two or three hours and a few dozen grams of filament before they'd clog up sure i used stefan's awesome tutorial for continuing failed prints to fix a couple of them but a couple i failed to unfail my fail then there's the annoying stuff like warping during printing breaking when you pull them off the bed or the hot glue drying before you realize that one corner is a millimeter off which will mean that none of the bins will fit properly in that entire base plate bonus sub tip make sure you glue the grids in perfectly square because slower drying glue and patience are greater than fast glue and millennial like impatience eventually when i got to printing those smaller ones i realized how nicely the gridfinity plates pair up with one another and the edges are designed to be half the width of the inner divisions genius and considering that the smaller ones print better or less of a problem if they fail or less of a hassle if you glue them in slightly crooked in retrospect i wish that i'd just broken up my massive drawer into lots of smaller ones rather than trying to maximize my print bed which is a good enough segue into tip number eight print one part at a time until you are certain as you've probably gathered from my tips above i had a lot and i mean a lot of print failures while i figured out the exact right settings for printing these bins with each of my types of filament plus there are always the annoying everyday print failures that happen as a natural part of 3d printing filament gets stuck in your feeder router thingy your filament runout sensor decides to take the day off your nozzle clogs or the 3d printing gods just decide to give you the middle finger i wanted to do one of those dramatic pour out all my failed prints slo-mo shots but i also didn't want my wife to leave me so i threw out most of the failed prints before she could see how much money i'd burnt on filament this month i like you guys but i like her more the point is in my excitement to gridfinity my entire life yes that's a verb now i went about filling up my entire print bed with as many bins of a certain color as possible only to wake up in the morning with 700 grams of useless junk in retrospect i really wish i just printed a few pieces at a time taking my time to get it right until at least i had everything dialed in perfectly sure it would have only saved me 20 or 30 dollars but what's another day or two to wait especially since i have a feeling my gradfinity setup is never going to be fully complete and i'm going to be printing improvements and changes at least for the next few months so there you have it my top 8-ish tips for improving your gridfinity success i'd love to hear in the comments below did i miss anything and again i want to remind you if you'd like to see me try and make more videos like this one please subscribe and leave me a comment letting me know that i should keep going thanks for watching and happy 3d printing

Channel: The Next Layer

Views: 165,223

Keywords: 3d print, 3d printed, 3d printed organizers, 3d printer, 3d printing, 3d printing ideas, 3d printing models, 3d printing projects, alexander chappel, cnc kitchen, desk organizer, diy, gridfinity, home organization, home organization ideas, organization, useful 3d prints, voidstar lab, voidstar labs, workshop, workshop organization, workshop organization ideas, workshop organization projects, workshop organization tips, zach freedman, zach friedman, zack friedman

Id: KtbKwAuwv9s

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/haudankaivajasi]

Cool tips, will be handy!

I’d love to be able to print most of the bins in vase mode. Just starting my journey in this wondrous assortment of boxes!

[u/Extectic]

Great video, enjoyed it.

I'd personally consider it beneficial to print this stuff out of PETG, rather than PLA. At high temps there also to melt the plastic hard. Might get a bit of stringing... heat gun, 5 seconds, done.

Not necessarily because of heat resistance, but PETG is more flexible and thus less brittle, and should imo stand the test of time. Also, importantly, it creeps far less than PLA over time. If you put PLA under mechanical pressure it deforms and flows. All plastics do, but PETG less so.

But, I'm unashamedly a PETG fanboi. I mostly print in that. With a Prusa MK3 and the textured plate, it's even easier than and more enjoyable than PLA. The parts just pop off the print plate when the textured plate cools, and it's even more quiet - the PETG doesn't need the cooling fan to run at hyper speed, it just silently prints boxes.

I printed drawer gridfinity lattices that covered the print plate. No failures. I printed a plate full of boxes. No failures. This with a 0.8 mm E3D Revo nozzle. I don't know why people say PETG is hard. PETG is easy.

[u/I_am_Ron_Swanson]

Nice video, subbed

[u/therick_]

Great video! Subbed

[u/ClaudiuT]

Nice!