Box Builder & Some Lessons Learned

Grasshopper
1

Have quite a few boxes I want to 3D print. Various sizes. Wanted hinges that require no additional hardware and a latch that functions well.

This is pretty much a typical box that is available all over the internet with a few mods.

image
image1545Ă—996 94 KB

20260206_151752
20260206_1517521920Ă—1920 728 KB

Utility Container.gh (130.1 KB)

This required a lot of Solid Unions. My first go was a total disaster. Normally I just power on and let the slicer put things together, but I finally decided to knuckle down and see if I could actually make it work like I thought it should.

First lesson, make sure to have the base geometry clean. No “sort of close” stuff. I started out that way because I created the curves I needed by getting cross sections from an stl file. That really can cause the boolean stuff to go berserk. The next one was a little more insidious.

Previously I would extrude a curve, grab the cap holes component and presto. Yea, no, that is sketchy at best. Sometimes parts would union, sometimes not, sometimes it would deleted pieces. Bizarre at best. What cured that was creating a surface, then extruding the surface. Yea, I am sure some of the Enlightened on this forum know all about that. Problem is not all of us take the time to dig through everything. We sort of learn by doing. Anyway, once I figured those things out, it all came together pretty nicely.

It can stand some cleaning up and probably some optimizing, but hey, it works.

BTW, it now resolves to two pieces, the bottom and the top. Very clean. I did not put any height controls in, I find it easier to just drag the height out to where I need it.

2

Nice!

I have an incomplete script I started a while back that was meant to parametrically model tool boxes sold by Toyo Steel.

Maybe there’s stuff in here that’s useful? It generally was using the same approach: build everything as surfaces, then put it together.

One thing buried in here, within clusters, is some c# components that fillet all filletable edges of a polysurface. The standard GH component for filleting solids tends to glitch because of a tolerance when attempting to fillet all edges. This solves that. There are ways to use this strategically to speed up building a polysurface that needs fillets.

Anyway, just throwing my unfinished work on the pile incase it helps anybody.

TOYOMATIC
TOYOMATIC2921Ă—1370 120 KB

ToyomaticMulti.gh (283.3 KB)

3

Thanks for posting that. Was not aware of the Sasquatch. Very handy indeed. Going to give it a try on a few things.

4

I don’t even remember what I used Sasquatch for, lol.

It’s old, but there are a few components in it that are very handy and should probably be duplicated as native.