This is a 2 part gift box. The top piece has a hilbert curve design. The curved design, coupled with the curve give it an attractive appearance. Both pieces are held together by 4 pieces of 6 mm (dia) x 1.5 mm (thickness) magnets, glued into the cavities designed for holding them.
The hilbert curve is a space filling curve. This is used in the sense of “Fill the space with your ideas”.
I designed these as gift boxes for another 3D printed item. After the magnets are glued in, they provide ample holding power. The entire box including the contents can be lifted up by holding the lid.
The cover is designed to be used as a fridge magnet, after the contents are removed. The bottom may be used as a storage box on the table, or elsewhere. It's almost zero waste…
The approximate external dimensions of the box are : 81 mm x 99 mm x 63 mm. Wall thickness is 2 mm.
The design is reasonably well tested. I made 45 of these.
The top is ideally printed in two colors (as shown in the photos), one for the hilbert curve pattern and one for the body. A standard filament change operation ("ColorPrint") is enough to achieve this. Note that you don't need a multi-material capable printer, though having it may be useful in some cases.
I printed these with 0.35 mm layer height., with the stock 0.4 mm nozzle on my Prusa i3 MK2.
The top cover is printed upside down - i.e. the hilbert curve touches the build plate. The solid part of the top cover thus has overhangs. You need to change the "bridging angle" to achieve a satisfactory print quality. I use 45 degrees, as shown below:
This is how the bridging looks like, in PrusaSlicer. PrusaSlicer will warn you, but the prints should come out just fine.
The cavities for the magnets are designed with a bit of clearance, but I did find some magnets not going in without some pressure. I used CA (cyanoacrylate) adhesive first, but had a frustrating experience with it sticking to my fingers. I then switched over to a 2 part expoxy adhesive. This provided a reasonable balance between sticking/placement time (2-3 minutes) setting time (~5 minutes).
I printed the top and bottom parts 4 copies at a time on my printer.
Apart from the design idea and aesthetics, the hilbert curve design helps hide imperfections:
The hilbert curve is generated with the “L-system OpenSCAD library" by Hans Loeblich, version 2.0 : https://gist.github.com/thehans/a1494db8046a58832e2ebb10a5908a66
The entire box was modelled in FreeCAD. OpenSCAD was also used to mask the hilbert curve to the area of the top cover.
The author marked this model as their own original creation.