The box project was an en-devour to solve a problem that I faced over the summer of 2026, that being, how the heck do I 3D print something to hold my many screws and fasteners without using absolutely massive amount of material. In the end I managed the get it to a place I'm pretty happy with, albeit some aspects of the design are still under some development to work on transportation of the boxes and getting everything to play nice as a system.
These boxes were designed to around three requirements, they used little material, they were simple to manufacture, and they were reliable to repair. Unfortunately, V1 met zero of those requirements. However it did lay the groundwork for the lids and compartment design. It also gave crucial experience on how to work with minimum quantities of material in 3D printing while still keeping parts as strong as possible.
One of the focuses of the box project was a cost reduction campaign in order to get the price of maintaining my screw stockpile as low as possible. The material wastes were as follows...
The base plate was far too thick, it could be reduced significantly and still provide the majority of its functionality
The internal boxes did not need to exist, and if they did exist, they should be removable
The lids were super material heavy and not individually serviceable
While the system was workable, there were some issues with these. The first was that the way I had configurations set up in CAD was extremely poor, and needed a lot of work. The other issue was that the design had a lot of architectural issues that made updating and maintaining the model really rough. Especially after working on V2, there was a lot of work to be done here, and that thankfully got done in V2.
This was a really cool revision for both my manufacturing and CAD skills. The model for this was the first one that I designed to work well with both configurations and parameters. It was also a chance for me to scrape every single possible gram of filament out of this part. I also started integrating magnets into the assembly, which gives everything a seamless click when going together and allows an extension to what these parts can be used for.
These parts were some of the first to really be designed around the printer, rather than compromised to it. The walls are the minimum width to be strong and light, defined by the nozzle diameter. The "windows" and hinges, and clips all really on knowing and exploiting the exact layer height. Altogether this creates a part that's stronger than the original while being faster and cheaper to print. The entire thing can be printed in less than three hours for about 71 grams of material (that's between $1 and $1.75 of plastic).
These parts were all engineered around being massively configurable. From the basics of the container height and size, all the way down the the method they are attached to the base plate. For just a sampling a container can be
Threaded, Magneted, or Fused onto a Base
Containers can now have more than one bay, giving access to larger capacities.
Configurations mesh with each other allowing easy stacking across any choice of parameters
