{"id":35653,"date":"2021-03-06T10:28:30","date_gmt":"2021-03-06T15:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=35653"},"modified":"2021-03-06T10:28:30","modified_gmt":"2021-03-06T15:28:30","slug":"akro-mils-harbor-freight-small-drawer-dividers-in-freecad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=35653","title":{"rendered":"Akro-Mils\/Harbor Freight Small Drawer Dividers (in FreeCAD)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Installed<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been doing some component stocking lately, and haven’t really set up a solid storage system, so I picked up a Harbor Freight 40+1 drawer cabinet thing<\/a> to manage various small size + small quantity parts.

There are slots in the drawers to take dividers, but Harbor Freight doesn’t sell them, and Akro-Mils charges a bit much – somewhere in the vicinity of $10\/16pcs – for injection molded dividers that experience says don’t fit terribly well. The set of Akro-Mils drawers I use on campus for kitting out instructional labs has first-party dividers that tend to float just enough to get pins trapped under them, which leaves me less than enthusiastic about spending money on those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw some folks 3D Print their own<\/a>, but always feel silly 3D printing flat parts, and wanted something clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

..So I took some measurements, ordered some 0.078″\/2mm polycarbonate sheet, and CAD’d up the shape. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"FreeCAD<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I did a quick parametric sketch\/extrude\/profile in FreeCAD 0.18, and unlike the last couple times I tried to build something in FreeCAD, the Sketch constraint system didn’t bug out, the Path workbench didn’t crash, and it posted reasonable gcode. I am very pleased by this development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, it is a trivial part (rectangular, 2mm thick, 34mm tall, 50mm wide for the bottom 17mm, 51mm wide for the top 17mm), but I had earlier versions of FreeCAD fall over on similarly-trivial projects, usually in the path workbench. I’d really like to have (and be vaguely competent at using) a decent all-FOSS design flow for the router, so this is an exciting development. File here<\/a> if anyone wants it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was the usual CNC fuckery (losing Z steps because I plunged too aggressively for the bit, tapping the Z- stop because I had the spindle raised in its clamp for working off a vise and forgot, etc.), some of which were solved by finally switching my Z axis motor to a slightly higher current since I keep having problems with running out of Z force. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had I looked a little closer I would have noticed there are third party laser-cut acrylic dividers available for like $0.33\/ea compatible with the Akro-Mils small drawer size, but if you ignore the …$1000-odd of CNC machine and tooling and the value of my time… these come out to like $0.16, so it’s not completely absurd from that angle, and it was a good tool-chain test. Also, happily, they fit significantly tighter than the Akro-Mils injection molded ones, so no trapped pins. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing some component stocking lately, and haven’t really set up a solid storage system, so I picked up a Harbor Freight 40+1 drawer cabinet thing to manage various small size + small quantity parts. There are slots in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,37,1,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diy","category-electronics","category-general","category-objects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}