Weighted Apple Pencil Holder

Weighted holder for an Apple Pencil 2. It is hollow so it can be filled with sand or lead shot.
3
30
0
271
updated August 27, 2023

Description

PDF

Details
 

I wanted a holder for an Apple Pencil 2 that had some weight to it so it would stay in place. I also wanted to only contact on the shoulder, not the replaceable nib at the tip. 

I thought about different ways of adding weight, at first designing around solid lead or tungsten pieces inserted during the print, but I wanted the weight to feel distributed over the whole thing so I ended up with #7.5 lead shot because it's easy to find and cheap. This design uses about one pound. In earlier versions, I tried pausing the print before the top layers and pouring the lead shot in from the top but that's messy and I kept getting layer separation at the place I paused. I just redesigned it with a plug in the bottom that screwed in.  But, I wanted to keep the pencil protected from whatever is used for weight, so that led to the mostly hollow design with a sort of sleeve around the pencil.
 

I big help when designing this was an accurate model of the Pencil 2 from GrabCAD

 

Printing

NOTE: I'm changing the design to make this easier to print. The center sleeve is prone to falling over during printing. 

I have printed this in ABS and PLA.

  • Print in natural orientation, wider base on bottom. 
  • 0.2mm layer height
  • 15-25% infill, others probably work too. I use cubic, but other patterns should be fine.
  • 4 perimeters.
  • 5 top and 5 bottom layers for the holder. Depending on your printer and infill, you may want to adjust the top layers to be sure to hide the infill pattern. I also did ironing post processing and monotonic infill on top just to make it look better.
  • Supports ONLY underneath the tip of the “sleeve” inside the holder. Do not have supports on the threads. All other angles on the inside should be ok for most printers without supports.
  • Print the plug with either side up. The slot will print just fine down. 
  • Depending on your printer and material, you may need to adjust the thread clearance see below. 


Required Parts

  • Lead shot or similar. I used a little over 10oz of  #7.5 Lead shot 
  • Some sort of rubber sheet for the bottom to keep it from sliding around on a desk

 

Assembly

  • After printing, remove supports. 
  • Turn the the holder upside down and carefully pour the lead shot into the bottom hole, be sure to leave the end of the sleeve exposed. There's only 0.5mm of clearance between the plug and the end of the sleeve.
  • Screw in the plug with some flat tool. A designed around a large slotted screwdriver but a ruler, tweezers and many other things will work. Try to get the plug level with the bottom of the holder, but error on the side of a bit sunken rather than proud of the surface
  • In the CAD files, I included a 10-sided cutting template. If you scale that to 50mm in your slicer, it makes a good jig for cutting the rubber sheet. If you don't want to bother, just cut a 50mm diameter circle in the rubber sheet.

 

Design Notes and Possible Adjustments
 

I'm publishing the CAD file in STEP and F3D formats in case you want or need to change the design or are curious how it was done. Here are some notes about how this was done and what can be changed easily:

Overall, the design is two components. The pencil from GrabCAD in one, then my design in the other. In the timeline, I did things in this order:

  • I projected geometry from the pencil component to make a sketch of the sleeve. This is the part that holds the pencil. It holds on the shoulder, and provides clearance of the main body as well as clearance below the pencil tip. Revolve this sketch into a sleeve body. Almost all the dimensions in this first sketch are user parameters. The angles in this sketch or to avoid steep overhangs when printing. This part is supported by internal fins to keep it in place while printing. Without these, I had failures sometimes. 
  • I then used offsets from the sleeve to define top and bottom sketch planes for the shape of the main holder, then loft between those. By tying these sketch planes to the first sleeve sketch, which makes use of  main_overall_height the design tries to maximize the length of pencil that is inside the holder for a given height.
  • You can change the number of sides! The number of sides is a parameter: main_num_sides. Thanks to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhN5OPHW9NY for teaching me how to do this. The polygon tool in Fusion360 does not let you adjust the number of sides later. Instead I used the workaround in the video.
  • Thread clearance: main_thread_extra_clearance. Depending on the printer and the material, the default clearance from Fusion360's thread tool often doesn't work for 3D printing, when it is both sides of the thread are printed.  To get more clearance, I selected all four faces of the thread on each side (eight faces total) and then did the Offset Face operation using the parameter as a value. Using a value of 0.1mm works for me with a well tuned ABS profile, but I needed 0.15-0.2mm to make Filamentum PLA Extrafill PLA work. PLA is sticker than ABS and the ExtraFill needs a bit more room. A loose fit is ok with the threads, because you're going to cover it with the rubber sheet.
  • Pencil clearance: sleeve_clearance_around_pencil. Just like the thread clearance, I had to adjust this between 0.30mm for ABS to 0.40mm for the ExtraFill PLA. With the PLA, 0.30mm worked ok, but the sides of the pencil rubbed a bit.
  • Plug diameter. You can adjust the plug diameter, but you MUST also adjust the two thread operations because Fusion360 will resize to fit the selected thread profile. If you just adjust plug_dia, the thread operations will just resize that back to 25mm until you adjust the those operations. I don't know how to parameterize the thread operation.
  • I like lots of parameters, so most things are. But, not everything is and the sketches are not fully constrained so you may get odd results adjusting things too far. 
     

Please comment if you have a question or have trouble printing. 

Tags



Model origin

The author marked this model as their own original creation.

License


Highlighted models from creator

View more