Parametric endmill index/holder

A flat, secure index (holder) for some cheap end-mills I picked up for cleaning support material out of recessed holes. Should be able to use the Customizer (in OpenSCAD 2019.05 or later) to match whatever endmills you have. Worked pretty well for a drill bit, too.

Insert the endmills at an angle, then push down flat. Little ridges help ensure a secure fit, even if you turn it upside down and shake it a bit.

To access a mill, push down on its bottom so that the tip pops upward and can be removed. (The first couple of times, a gentle assist from a small pliers might be helpful until the ridges wear a bit. Their fit is customizable.)

Print Settings

Printer Brand:

Prusa

Printer:

Mk2.5s

Rafts:

No

Supports:

No

Resolution:

0.2mm

Infill:

20% is more than enough

Filament: They went out of business having earned their demise; just trying to use it up. PLA Purple

Notes:

I included a brim because of a slight curl when I printed a small holder by itself during design testing. Probably not needed if you're doing a whole set.

How to Customize ================

Endmill dimensions

Unfortunately, Thingiverse's customizer will not let you change the vector of endmill dimensions. OpenSCAD 2019.05 will, using its own customizer interface panel; I encourage you to download it (http://www.openscad.org/) and give it a try. You may need to install the free Roboto Condensed Bold font (install for all users if running Windows); that's available from https://github.com/google/roboto/releases --- or you can try a different font.

The endmills I bought were labeled on their individual boxes and (usually) etched on the side with four numbers (in mm, as this was a metric set). For example, the smallest is marked 2x6x7x51 which means that the cutting tip has a 2mm diameter, the shaft is 6mm diameter, the functional cutting depth is 7mm, and the overall length is 51mm. This is entered as a vector of those numbers: [2,6,7,51].

The complete "endmills" parameter looks something like this, [[2,6,7,51], [3,6,8,52], ... , [12,12,26,83]] with the endmills from 3mm to 10mm replacing the ....

This vector can be as long as your printer has space or as few as 1. For that 12mm drill bit, I set the endmills to [[12,12,100,150]]

Verify the lengths!

I trusted the measurements printed. Turned out, the supplier seems to have substituted a 6mm mill from a different manufacturer. Even though the endmil itself was etched with a 57mm length, the reality is that it was 60mm long, so I had to print out the whole thing again.

Geometry and text

If you want, you can tweak the wall thickness, the clearance around a mill, the interference depth for the ridges that help hold the endmills flat, and the insertion angle (maybe your endmills are very differently proportioned than mine).

If you don't want ridges at all, set the interference to the negative of your clearance.

If you have fractional diameters or use a different font, you'll probably need to drop the text scaling. If you don't want text, you should be able to set the extrusion depth to 0, but I didn't special-case that, so it might cause weird geometry in the .stl. Let me know if that's an issue.

Category: Tool Holders & Boxes