New 3D Print Project: Diamine Inkvent Box

[First a disclaimer: This and the other Inkvent 3D prints I've posted about in the past are personal projects. I'm not working with Diamine, nor am I trying to infringe on their trademarks or intellectual property.]

Over the last 4 years, I've purchased the Diamine Inkvent set because it's a fun ink swatching project to do throughout December. Regular readers are aware of the Inkvent tree stands we've made (and are selling) that are both really cool display pieces and functional items, but they take up a lot of space. I think the size is a sticking point for some people who've seen the tree stands.

Because I haven't yet used up, swapped away, or sold any of the inks from the previous sets, I have 96 little 12 mL bottles and 4 30 mL bottles sitting around my office in various tree stands and snowflake boxes my husband designed and printed for me. They're disparate and taking up too much space, so I thought about a compact box for storing the inks in a more practical way.

My Initial Thought Process

I started out simply laying out the set of bottles with the large bottle in the center and the other bottles arranged in two "rings" around it.

Could've stopped there, making a simple box with a grid of dividers and a lid that can accommodate the height of the tallest bottle. It would be quite compact! But of course, I couldn't just stop there. That's no fun! 😆

In the snowflake box, Paul designed a spot for the tall bottle in the center where it would sit down in a deeper inset when fully put away, but it could be rotated 45º to be placed in a higher slot as the "tree top" when the tiers were arranged into a tree:

I took that small idea and wanted to replicate it in this compact box so that the inner tier around the middle bottle could sit up a bit higher than the outer tier when rotated 45º. So I rearranged the bottles like this to determine the minimum footprint to accommodate that arrangement:

Through my rough calculations I realized the footprint would just barely fit my Bambu A1 Mini's small 180mm x 180 mm build plate. I drew a rough sketch for how I thought the two trays would look.

I was very roughly guesstimating margins and sizes of the trays. I know the cutouts for rotating the trays aren't to scale or even drawn correctly, I just needed something I could use to illustrate what I wanted when discussing with my husband so he could put his CAD designing mind to it.

The Inkvent Box

A little while later, he came up with this box design:

The box securely contains all of the bottles, including the tall one, laying down in the center. When you want to deploy the "tree form" of the box, the middle bottle sits upright, rotated 45º, and the four bottles in the corners of the inner tray move into slots that were vacated to allow the tall bottle to lie down.

Then you use the finger grips around the tall bottle to pull the inner tray out and rotate it 45º to fit into the little cutouts in the inner wall.

For a bit of height, you can place the trays on top of the lid.

We're playing around with some ideas for allowing the trays to stack securely on the lid this way, and for stacking the closed boxes together, as we know that many Inkvent buyers have several sets. That update will be coming some time later.

However, as is, the boxes can stack cleanly on top of each other, or even vertically on a shelf, as the lid is close enough to the bottle tops to keep them secure in that orientation.

My plan for my Inkvent set collection is to print out a box in the corresponding color to the yearly theme. Since I have green and black sparkly filament I already printed those out. I have sparkly teal and purple filaments on the way. 😀

Why the Shape?

I got a question when I posted teaser pictures of the closed box yesterday, why the box is octagonal? Originally the box was a regular square shape. But the corners that square off the box aren't usable space.

I was having some issues getting the top and bottom surfaces of the box printed without artifacts for various reasons. And since the corners that squared off the box were not usable space, I asked my husband to cut them off to make it a tad easier for me to print. It'd use less filament (though I suppose not a lot less overall), and there would be less surface area so that I could mess around with using a brim to help keep the corners flat, etc... I won't bore you with all the 3D printing details. I also ultimately liked the octagonal shape because it looks more interesting than the plain square box.

But I've played around with printing settings and switched away from the smooth build plate to my regular textured plate, which helps with adhesion and camouflaging minor printing artifacts, so I could potentially go back to printing the square version, if people wanted that. My settings might also work okay with the smooth build plate I have with the shimmery holographic pattern I was using before. I'll have to test it out. But I will stick with the octagonal box for my use.

What's Next

As I previously mentioned, we're thinking through ways to securely stack the boxes together, and to stack the trays onto the lid for the elevated "tree form".

Also, there aren't numbers to place the Inkvent bottles in order. We were thinking about a couple ways the numbers would be ordered in the trays, but haven't finalized it yet. We could provide a few different versions for the numbering (none, random, sequentially around the edges of the trays, or sequentially across the rows), but we'll see.

Eventually my husband will post the 3D print files for sale so that people can print their own. I can sell printed boxes if you don't have easy access to a 3D printer. I'm working through how to price them.

I also suggested that my husband think about a version of this box for ink sample vials, for people who do "inkvent" sample swaps instead of buying the Diamine sets.

Feel free to reach out if you're interested in getting one of these Inkvent Boxes! You can e-mail me at CherylLindoJones+inkvent AT gmail DOT com.