Shop organizing, cleanup, and storage are a
never-ending quest and today I'm going to take a stab at improving my current systems. Up until now
I thought I had what was a pretty good solution- Using the Harbor Freight storage cases as my own
Adam Savage inspired "poor man" Sortimo system. Those cases, along with my own 3D printed
inserts, have worked out pretty well for me, at least up to this point. Working on our carnival
ride restoration project, I'm finding myself needing to store parts that exceed the capacity
of my current system and I don't know if I can go bigger using my current methods. Coincidentally
I had a viewer send me an email. He was asking if I had ever considered printing larger 3d
inserts. I explained that I hadn't. That the limiting factor was the size of my Ender 3 printer.
I could only print bins up to a certain size. I did revisit the issue though, and I determined there
was one additional size bin that I could manage to fit on the print surface if I oriented it
diagonally. Due to the larger size though, it was kind of flimsy so I increased the wall thickness
and I added some stiffening ribs down the side. So he went on to ask if I had ever designed the
inserts for the larger Harbor Freight case. That's this one here- They call this their 8 bin large
portable parts case. and I explained that no, I haven't because I don't use very many of these. I
only have two, well this one makes three actually. But I thought with my changing storage
requirements, now might be the time to have another look at these larger cases. These present
a few challenges for 3d printing -things that are slightly different from the smaller inserts that
I previously designed. On the small case inserts, I was able to eliminate the taper, or draft as it's
called, on the sides of the bin. That's just put there so that these will pop out of the cavity in
the injection mold that they're made in. On my 3D printed version, I printed these with straight
sides and that resulted in a bin with a slightly larger internal volume than the stock bin. Now I
don't know if that allowed me to store something that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to, but
it's just one of the design choices I had made. On the larger bins, I can't ignore
that taper. Since the case is taller it has more room to develop. The angle itself is
no more severe, it's still about 2 degrees. But the distance over which it travels is greater, and
the case also has the same taper. So if I were to use the top dimension for my bins, they wouldn't
be able to slip all the way down into the case. And if I use the bottom dimensions, well then
I'm just wasting potential storage space. So I need to include that taper in my design.
Another design consideration is wall thickness. These bins are larger and are going to be used
presumably to store larger, potentially heavier items. I feel like the side walls should be beefed
up a little bit over the original design. And finally on the smaller bins I included the feet
that lock the bin into the bottom of the case. It's a nice feature to have but it isn't
strictly required. On these larger bins, I decided to eliminate the feet. Including them
drastically increases print time and requires an entire support structure to be printed underneath
the bin. This both increases print time and can have an adverse effect on the surface finish. The
lid of the case is keyed to hold the bins in place and I typically always have full cases,
so there's no place for the bins to slide. So now that I've got a model that looks like it'll work,
the only thing left to do is print it and see how it fits. Before I can attempt to print these new inserts,
I have another problem I need to tackle. I don't know if you can relate to this
or not, but when I work on a big project, like this almost antique carnival ride that I've
been restoring, I tend to pull out a lot of tools. If a particular tool isn't working for me, I'll
just grab another one. But I don't necessarily put the first tool away and the reason for that is
I don't know if the tool I just grabbed is gonna work better or worse than what I already have,
so I still want it to be on hand. Unfortunately, that causes the shop to become cluttered over
time. I need to do a better job of staying on top of that so I don't end up with these huge messes
that require me to stop everything and sort out. This is really a mess under the bench,
someday I hope to clean this up. In a previous video I was designing custom
inserts to store Ryobi cordless tool accessories and I had found what I thought was a pretty
good shade of green to match the Ryobi color. Since then I found what I believe is an even
better match. This is a color called "Lulzbot Green" by a company called 3D Fuel and I will
leave a link to it as well as some of the other supplies I use, down in the video description.
Now I'm going to be using these bins in my workshop so I don't need to be too concerned
with the material I use for printing. I can pretty much print these out of any filament
I have on hand and get acceptable results. But if you're going to be making these for mobile
use, where you're going to be potentially storing them in a hot vehicle, you're going to have
to stay away from PLA filament. PLA is not up to that environment- they'll warp and melt.
You'll need to print with either PETG or ABS. I can see where the separation
is starting. Now PETG is not much more difficult to print than PLA,
it's just a few different settings. ABS on the other hand requires a bit more prep,
usually an enclosure over the whole printer to seal out drafts. Those drafts can
cause the finished part to warp. Fellas, that's what 9 inches really looks like. These take quite a while to print due to
their size. But you can just start the process and walk away. I've heard
this referred to as passive time. If you calculate in advance the amount
of time that's going to be required, and you realize it's going to be tens or even
hundreds of hours, it can be quite daunting. But your actual hands-on involvement is only
minutes and before you know it they're done. So I've come up with a total of 18 different
sizes of bins, and they are all some multiple of this bin right here. This is the smallest
bin that will lock into the grid pattern on the harbor freight case. So everything is based
around this. And this is 1/4 the size of the smallest bin that actually Harbor
Freight ships with the case. So everything is a multiple of this. We'll either multiply the short
side or the long side by one, two, three times and that's how we get all the different sizes of
bins. It looks to me like these are going to work out great. I will leave a link down below in the
video description to a site where you can get all these 3D models for your own printing. If you want
to see what it takes to restore a carnival ride in your backyard, I got a whole playlist- click
that link to the left and come along for the ride!
