clockspring3D
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Regulation Tape Caddy
🕑 Added 2020-10-30 15:29:47 +0000 UTCHave you ever tried printing a blade? Wait, no incriminating answers, please! I mean, some thing for stationery purposes, since we're looking at another component for the Regulation Caddy System. Specifically: a tape caddy!
Now, this thing works mostly quite well! The screw-in spool holder retains the spool and allows the tape to be pulled out and over the top. Angles are all arranged so there's plenty of room for a standard tape roll, but of course without requiring supports during printing. So, what's the problem? Well, blades!
See that there? It's a printed blade! It prints flat, with an attempt at corrugation, but at least with PLA there's really no chance of getting a reliable, durable blade that will cut tape.
So, what I did (not shown in these pics) is grabbed a roll of cling wrap (that's Glad wrap, Saran wrap, plastic wrap or food wrap, depending on where you happen to live), and cut off a little section of the in-built metal serrated blade, and wedged that in. And that worked nicely! There are probably plenty of similar blade-type things that could be used like that, but you probably don't want to use anything that would slice fingers...
Printing Tips
Everything's designed for support-free printing, and there are no tricky aspects to this model. You'll want to make sure your dimensional accuracy is reasonably good seeing as parts need to fit into each other, but the tolerances are very generous anyway.
The parts print like so:
File Location
You'll find this on dropbox under:
798 Regulation Caddy System / tape caddy
(dropbox post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31697592 )
Final Thoughts
This was certainly fun to develop, but I do wish there was a better way to approach the whole blade thing... maybe that's something to explore in later projects - how to incorporate blades into functional designs without turning them into injury machines... :)
Enjoy!
xoxo
Sven.
Comments
Kyle
I feel like I might be missing something but where do you grab the tape from? Shouldn't there be a cutout or something just before the blade to grab the tape and cut small pieces?
Clockspring3D
That's an interesting problem! It's possible that your prints are just so precise that the amount of tolerance built into the models is enough that the threads don't have enough overlap! That can be a problem with particularly small things, which that bolt certainly is. Now, Cura has a nice feature for managing the outer shell dimensions called Horizontal Expansion - Google tells me PrusaSlicer has an equivalent called XY Size Compensation. See if that helps, but let me know if it's still causing problems and I'll make a bigger bolt :)
I'm printing the Regulation Caddy System... Printed the Clamp parts today, but am struggling. The thread of the clamp bolt just slides right through the thread of the clamp bottom v2 and the clamp nut. Both printed a the same time on Prusa Mini. I even tried printing the nut at 98%, but still, the bold slides through! Any thoughts as to what I'm doing wrong? Thanks! LOVE your models :-D
Clockspring3D
That's a lot of printing! How much filament did that consume?!
LOL! I share that sentiment!
I didn't factor into my patreon membership the additional cost in filament. Must stop printing all of Clockprint 3D's items. But they are so good, its proving difficult. :D
