Capacitance Sleeved Card Box

Hey there, wonderful people!

Yes, this is the other case for sleeved cards - the overly complicated one! It's a steampunk-ish box with a lid that swings a full 270 degrees, the reason for which we will get to soon! But first, interior dimensions! As with the Slimline Sleeved Card Box this is designed to hold single-sleeved "standard" cards, which is to say 63mm x 88mm cards (e.g. Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, and an abundance of others).

Interior dimensions: 80mm wide, 96mm tall, and 70mm deep.

You'll notice that the only figure there that's different to the Slimline box is the width, which is a full 10mm wider, again for reasons that will ... okay, let's just get into it now, because it's the fun bit of the design, really! So, that lid, the one that rotates a full 270 degrees: the reason it's like that is so that the front of the lid can rest on the print bed and contain moving parts for the closure mechanism. If the lid was hinged half-way, which would be far simpler, the top of the lid would be on the print bed, which doesn't achieve what this model is aiming for.

The insert!

But there's an interesting consequence to this, and that is that the distance from the hinge to the bottom of the box must be equal to the distance from the hinge to the front of the lid so that it can rest on the print bed. So, that's why the box ended up a little wider internally than is really needed for standard sleeved cards. Now, it would be trivial to just take up the room in the interior with an arbitrary wall shift, but that seemed silly and so instead there's an insert that just takes up 5mm on either side so that standard cards fit nicely again.

As it turns out, putting a screw latch on the front was enormously complicated!

In the first attempt, there were thread blocks on either side that the lid could screw into. Except, have a look at how that lid moves. Because the hinge is so high, the lid is sweeping down on quite an angle. Once the thread engaged, the lid was moved further down, but that also changed the angle of the lid and hence on the screw mechanism in the handle. So, the threads were constantly changing angle relative to each other, and so they just got jammed up.

So, the engaging thread moved to the bottom instead, but those threads were sitting at roughly 45 degrees. And the lid was moving at roughly 45 degrees. What this meant was that the threads could just pull away from each other with only the slightest of resistance. So, from there is was a case of rebuilding the threads to be bigger, with steeper angles, and finally that worked! Well, in conjunction with also adding guiding planes that keep the lid from just being pushed upwards and open again!

Print Description

This is an articulated model, so watch out for print issues like overextrusion and stringing that might bind moving parts together!

Print Dimensions

The box occupies 217mm x 93mm on the print bed and is 115mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

You could probably scale this a little, but scaling up is going to impact how secure the closure is, as everything will get a little looser and parts may get enough play to be able to pull past each other.

Print Orientation

The Capacitance Sleeved Card Box prints base-down, with the lid open and folded back onto the print bed.

Further Thoughts

Oh, and those sides are another case of layers with detail behind, except in this case it's very difficult to see what's going on back there! If the grille wasn't in the way, you'd see some gears jutting out of the box and meshing with each other, but it's very difficult to actually make it out in the print. The hollow mesh wall thing is always fun to build, though! :)

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.

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519 Capacitance Sleeved Card Box