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I have a teenage son, who has this amazing habit of picking things up and playing with them while talking to you, then putting them down somewhere completely different, and having zero recollection of even seeing said object. This results in a slow but extremely thorough shuffling of not just the workspace, but the entire house. It’s also possibly than I’m a little OCD, and have spent way too much of my life looking for tools or fasteners that I “put down somewhere”. So some kind of modular storage/organization system was essential, along with banning my son from my workspace.
After some research, I stumbled onto Gridfinity, a modular storage system based on 42mm x 42mm x 7mm grids, that is open source, free, 3D printable, and is almost infinitely customizable. More details can be found on the Gridfinity Unofficial Wiki.
The first choice was to select a base plate. The basic base plate looks fairly light/flimsy, and I was looking for something more substantial that could also be expanded, so settled on this Screw Together Baseplate, which not only allows you to attach one baseplate to another, but it also has magnets to keep the storage accessories in place. Magnets are cool.
The 7 x 7 grid was the biggest that would fit on my Creality CR-10 3D Printer, so loaded up some PLA and left it running for just over a day.
While it was printing, I went ahead and ordered some 6mm x 2mm round magnets from Amazon. It uses a lot of magnets – 49 squares times 4 magnets per square puts you at almost 200, and that’s before putting magnets in the storage accessories that will sit on top of it, so you can expect to double that.
The magnets were supposed to be ‘Press Fit’, but no way would they press in, the holes were too small by about 1/3rd of a millimeter – admittedly I’ve not spent a lot of time calibrating my printer, so that could be the problem. This was easily fixed with a 6mm drill bit and a very light touch with a cordless drill, but doing it almost 200 times did get a little tedious.
So far so good, I’m now beginning to experiment with compatible storage accessories.
First need is holder for pliers/snippers. There are numerous styles available, I went with these. Pretty happy with result, with one exception – they don’t have holes for the magnets. After some careful drilling that’s a fixable problem, but I’m not going to share a photo of the underside for obvious reasons. Next time I’d either look for a different version with magnet holes, or try to edit in holes with Fusion 360.
I also experimented with some basic storage bins at different heights, and test printed a lid so I can label items. These bins did have holes for press fitting the magnets, but again I had to break out the 6mm drill bit to make them work:
Pretty happy with the results so far, it’s definitely going to do the job. Now need to figure out what else I need and get printing.