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
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.
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:
main_overall_height
the design tries to maximize the length of pencil that is inside the holder for a given height.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.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.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_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.Please comment if you have a question or have trouble printing.
The author marked this model as their own original creation.