Tag: openscad

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3D Printed Sign Letter Stencil

Dana and I went to the “No Kings” protest last weekend, and I asked if she wanted one of the signs I made, or if she wanted to come up with something. She didn’t have any ideas until Friday night, so I rushed to get a sign made for her Saturday morning. Here it is! If you haven’t seen Daniel’s comments, check it out.

To make the sign I started in Inkscape with an Tabloid (11″x17″) canvas, and typed out the words. My plan was to 3D print the letters and us them for the stencil.

The red squares represent the size of the print bed on my 3D printer. I could not print the whole thing in one go so I broke it into two sections…

Here’s the first section. I brought the SVG into OpenSCAD and extruded it 1.5mm tall. Once I did that I exported an STL file I could print.

With the letters printed in black filament I put them down on the tabloid size foam core board to act as a stencil. With the letters being 1.5mm tall they had enough weight I didn’t need to worry about the paint blast blowing them away.

Spray Spray Spray! Paint goes on, letters (in place) stay. I let things dry for a bit…

Then removed the letters. A sign! I did think that it might have been fun to just glue on the 3D printed letters, though that would have added a little more weight to it. Still, ideas for the future… especially with multi-color printing. But again, I wanted to make a sign fast.

For good measure I added a 3D printed handle to the sign. I tweaked a design someone else threw together but I’m working on my own version now.

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OpenSCAD Springy Example

Previously on… the Fediverse! I posted about this springy thing I was designing, and I said:

I’m trying to come up with a good way of creating this in OpenSCAD… I have something using a bunch of hull’d cylinders but I’m wondering if there is a better/easier way to do it.

First of all, I love OpenSCAD. I also love sharing. I was really pleased to see people coming up with ideas. Hey, maybe we should make a weekly OpenSCAD Coding Club!

deshipu suggested Inkscape for a 2D vector and then importing.

Bryan Fink suggested rotate_extrude which I often forget about. I would have never thought to use it for this. See Bryan’s example.

Makerblock came through and wrote a whole post about this thing!

Alistair Buxton also wrote some code you should check out and used the 2D parts of OpenSCAD I usually ignore.

And oh yeah! Here’s mine:

See the code here! This also spurred me to finally make that OpenSCAD repo on Codeberg. I’d like to fill it with bit and pieces of things. I already share a bunch of designs on Printables but this repo will be more code focused and have things that are not finished projects. (Though I may also add finished projects.)

Basically I only know how to do these things because others did them and were willing to share. I’m doing my part… are you!?

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Fancy Sanding Blocks

About a year ago I “designed” (ha ha!) and 3D printed the Super Boring Sanding Block which has served me well for sanding miscellaneous wood in the shop, but I found a nice parametric sanding block for OpenSCAD so I thought I’d give it a try.

You can adjust the length, width, and height, and basically make it any size you want. I made mine to fit the sheets of sandpaper I normally buy. I’ve now got six of them with various grit for each one so I can just grab the right one and get to work. (I also added labels to each using the Niimbot.)

My one complaint (which someone else also had) is that you can’t easily figure out the size needed to fit a specific length of sandpaper. I don’t know if there is some OpenSCAD wizardry or maths that would do this for you, but my solution was to print a really thin version (repeatedly) and adjusting the numbers until it properly fit my sandpaper, then I made full width versions. Things like sanding blocks are a perfect match for 3D printing.

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Customizable Trays in OpenSCAD

A 3d Printed Customizable Tray

This is an OpenSCAD script that can create custom trays/drawers based on the dimensions you set, because it is a parametric design. If you’re new to OpenSCAD this might be a nice project to examine. It uses the BOSL2 library (Belfry OpenSCAD Library, v2.0), and it’s a pretty simple and (hopefully) easy to understand script.

A 3d Printed Customizable Tray

I tend to use this to create small “drawers” to fit on my desk, or under my monitor stands. The large one pictured is 185x185x40, but the idea is for you to make them whatever size you need as it’s a parametric design where you set the variables to have whatever values work for your specific situation.

A 3d Printed Customizable Tray

If you’ve used OpenSCAD and mainly stuck to the cube you might want to look at the MCAD library or the BOSL2 library, as they offer a lot more options for creating cubes (and other shapes). Of course with more power comes more complexity, but you can make rounded cubes of all sorts with MCAD and BOSL2. (MCAD was my go-to for rounded cubes but I’m just getting into BOSL2 and this is my first project using it.)

You can get the .scad file from Printables.com – Customizable Tray. Open the .scad file in OpenSCAD, change the dimensions, and render a tray!

A 3d Printed Customizable Tray

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Rugged Parametric Box in OpenSCAD

Universal Parametric Rugged Box by Rainer Backes is perfect. Read more below if you need to.

Universal Parametric Rugged Box by Rainer Backes

I mentioned “Rugged Boxes” a bit in my Hardware Gridbox post, but the idea is basically a small box with a latch that is rugged, so it’s like a tiny Pelican case that you can print yourself.

It’s the sort of thing that if you want one a specific size for a specific use that someone else also needs, you might find it easily… but if you want it a custom size just for your specific application, well… you need to be able to adjust the design. There are a bunch of parametric designs that work with Fusion 360 (which I do not use) and I don’t know if Rugged Box (Parametric) by Whity is the original but it’s definitely quite popular.

Here’s an 80x80x60 version I printed, but I wanted something smaller. I tried this one but didn’t like it. So finally, we’ve got one that ticks all the boxes!

Universal Parametric Rugged Box by Rainer Backes is perfect. And by “perfect” I mean it’s written in OpenSCAD, and it works. At least my first print worked, as you can see by the photos. I haven’t pushed the design too hard yet, but being done in OpenSCAD means I can go crazy with it.

This saves me the trouble of having to write my own, which I did start working on. While I do enjoy designing objects I also enjoy finding code that someone else wrote that does exactly what I need. It looks like Rainer has a bunch of models written in OpenSCAD, so I may need to dig through the others for inspiration. Thanks, Rainer Backes!