clockspring3D
patreon
Keychain Caps
🕑 Added 2023-05-07 16:31:52 +0000 UTCHowdy, wonderful people!
Tiny caps that store tiny things! And which have holes for attaching a lanyard or keychain loop! These little hats come in single- and multimaterial varieties and feature a screw-in lid. The lid is underneath, so "lid" seems like an odd word, but let's just go with it...
All the prototyping of this one was around the specifics of that lid. An early version had the loop attachment point on the lid rather than on cap itself, but that meant an attached loop could potentially twist the lid open, which would be bad. The lid itself also doubled in thickness by the final version, purely to add thread depth and thus require more turns for the lid to open.
Of course, if you just want to use this ornamentally, say on a cap-oriented Christmas tree, you don't necessarily need the lid at all :)
Hand for scale - these are very small little things!
Print Description
This is a regular mode print! The two parts screw together, but the tolerances are quite generous so it should be fairly resilient to print variations.
There are plenty of shallow curves on this, so you might want to use a small layer height, or adaptive layers to make things nice and smooth.
Multimaterial Options
Files are provided for easy multimaterial printing, splitting the cap into two colours. I'm going to assume that if you have such a setup you already know what to do with the files!
Print Dimensions
The cap itself occupies 48mm x 35mm on the print bed and is 22mm tall.
Supports Needed?
Not at all! Designed for straightforward printing!
Scalability
There are two potential problems with scaling this one up! First is the obvious one, the thread, though you could potentially address that by scaling the lid slightly differently to the cap itself. The great things about threaded connectors is that they very nicely take up any slack.
The second issue is the inside "ceiling" of the cap, which is currently a bit of minor bridging, but depending on scale that could get messy. Not the end of the world, though, and it's hidden inside :)
Print Orientation
The cap prints right-way-up and the lid prints upside-down, like so:
File Location
You'll find this one at at 583 Keychain Cap
Link to dropbox post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31697592
Further Thoughts
It's funny how it's the little things that make things look right. For this one, you might expect it's the shape of the front bit (beak? bill?) that's important, but it was actually the angle of the main dome part that made all the difference! Discovering those things along the way are a huge part of what makes design satisfying :)
Happy printing!
xoxo
Sven.
