Overengineered Plate Rack / Saucer Rack

Please Read

To create a rack you need to print:

• 1 left rack
• 1 right rack
• 2 cross beams

All 4 pieces should be able to fit on an Ender 3 or a larger printer if the two side pieces are interlaced. The left and right sides are not interchangeable, you need to print one of each. Check out the assembly video here  ← Very important if you are daisy chaining multiple. 

The rest of this readme is not required to make this plate rack. Enjoy!

Plate Rack

This is a plate/saucer rack that I designed based on bracco23's cupboard plate rack on Thingiverse. It has some modified features.

• Added fillets for strength
• Shortened crossbeams from 10cm to 8 cm to accommodate smaller saucers. (send me an email/leave a comment if you would like a larger one too)
• Removed screw holes on joints so that there are no overhangs in the print
• Added angled dovetails instead of regular finger joints so that screws are not required to hold the parts together
• Used snap-fits to facilitate assembly
• M4 countersunk holes added to cross beams if you want to secure the rack to the floor/shelf with screws

Design Choices

• Mating features were designed with a 0.1 mm tolerance.
• Snap-fits were used to prevent the rack from coming apart. These snap-fits can be undone several times if the fit or orientation is incorrect
• Dovetails replaced finger joints so that the racks could not be pulled apart in the front/back direction.
• Dovetails have compound angles so that the racks cannot be pulled apart in the sideways direction either. You can only daisy chain backwards, it won't work if you try to snap together a rack in FRONT of another. 
• Chamfers were used in some key areas to ensure that Elephant's Foot effect does not interfere with critical assembly features.
• Relief slots of 2mm width were used on the crossbeams snap fits. They extend 5mm into the main body of the crossbeams. This is to prevent the snaps from breaking

Feel free to leave a comment or send me a message. I will incorporate feedback on my models in the next iterations

Print Settings

Printer Brand:

Creality

Printer: 

Ender 3 Pro

Rafts:

No

Supports: 

No

Resolution:

0.2mm

Infill: 

15-20% cubic

Notes:

Please use 3 shell layers instead of the default 2. 3 bottom layers and 4 top layers if you're using 15% infill. you may be able to get away with just 3 top layers if you use 20% infill, but this depends on your printer, filament, and tuning.

To get Cura to allow the models to interlock, I had to temporarily allow overlaps in the per-model settings.

Category: Kitchen & Dining