solarbird | An update to the project storage system project

So I’ve kind of become unfond of the hang-arbitrary-boxes-to-the-rack system I had developed initially. I mean, it worked! It worked fine! I didn’t have one come down in six months of testing, even just using tape to attach the boxes to their hangers. Failure rate of zero.

I just decided it was too irregular for me, and kind of ugly. Your milage may vary and the parts needed to make it work aren’t going away. It’s staying a feature.

But it’s also limited in terms of how big a project you can hang off the thing, right? So I started thinking about it, and came down on an idea of what amounts to pointer objects, pointing to, say, a nearby closet or other storage area that doesn’t actually have to be visible. The pointer objects could make the hidden storage visible, reducing the size of the problem and maybe even eliminating it entirely.

So that’s what I did:

They’re designed so you can use four colours via filament swaps even on a single-nozzle printer, and it’s not even fussy about it – these were printed using the Filament Friday high-speed profiles.

Plus I built them so they attach (with glue or double-sided tape) to the box-hanger elements, so those objects get re-used without modification, keeping them easily available for box hanging if you actually prefer the original idea.

Pointer (number) plate attached to single-height box plate. They fit double-height plates exactly so you can use those too.

The idea of the big white area is that you can either put dry-erase material on it and then use dry-erase markers, or you can just use a post-it of some kind instead. I did the latter because I don’t have any dry-erase material handy? But once we have spare money again I’ll do that I think.

Number plate with post-it on double-height box mounting plate, attached via double-sided tape.

(Okay, it’s not a real post-it, I was out of white ones and I wanted it white. YOU GET THE IDEA.)

So this is what a central unit looks like with number plates, which I think is a lot better than the add-on-boxes approach. Plus it lets you point to much larger boxes stored elsewhere – arbitrarily large storage elements, in fact. You could use this with standard shipping units if you were so inclined and had access to shipping units and weren’t using them to build, idk, a house or something.

Meanwhile, in the closet just to the right in this picture, the corresponding boxes. Notice that some of the boxes are much larger than anything you could actually hang directly on the unit. And now that I’m actually using it – the labels above are made up, but then I realised “oh wait I have actual projects too big for this system UNTIL NOW” – I can say I strongly prefer this version of the system.

But the old one is still 100% available if you prefer it. Anyway, in the closet:

ignore the “medium” label, I had an idea, it didn’t really work

And I realised yesterday that I have a laminator, so I can shake these designs up just a little and then laminate them and use dry-erase markers on these, too, if I want. In case that’s important for some reason. I mean, hey, you never know.

Anyway, that’s the big update. This is really starting to work for me. If you actually try this, let me know how it goes? There’s already a desktop-and-drawer open-organiser standard floating around in 3D-printing land, it seems to me that there’s room for a narrow-space vertical organisation standard too and if other people started designing for it that’d be pretty amazing. It is, after all, all out there and open.

(I can also a picture a single long row of these, along, say, one wall of a classroom, with one basket for each elementary or middle-school kid, right? Each with their own storage box that they printed. Art stuff could be in it, or something like that. Maybe above their coats, who knows?)

But I suppose we’ll just have to see whether the interest is actually there.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.