Rotating organizer tray

00:00

In this video, we're gonna be creating a spinning organization tray. These trays can be mounted on a pipe so they can spin and they can also stack for a ton of storage. These are great for screws and nuts, hardware or art supplies. And these are great for keeping small parts separated and easy to find. The skills we're gonna be learning in this video are gonna be the revolve tool, offsets, patterning, boolean, combines, and of course, some extrudes and fillets.

00:27

So let me go ahead and show you what the model looks like over here. You can see we've got three of these things. They are patterned across here. And if I spin these around here, I can see exactly how they kind of stack up here. And you can spin these around and you've got a whole bunch of different individual little bins here. Each one has eight little bins. So of course you can store quite a bit of supplies in these things and easily have access to each layer there. And each individual layer will actually spin separately. So it's pretty handy, nice little thing to have.

00:57

So let's jump in and see how we create something like this. So I'm gonna go head up here to File and I'm gonna say a New Project. And right over here, because I'm gonna be revolving this around, I'm just gonna create one little section of it. And I'm gonna start a sketch right over here and I'm gonna choose something like this plane right over here. And notice I'm here on the right plane and let's go ahead and just start with the line command. Notice it's already activated.

01:23

Now I don't wanna start at the origin because obviously we wanna have a hole in this thing, right? So I wanna start a little distance away from that. I'm gonna move up here and I'm gonna type in 50 millimeters because I know that is the height of that center hub that I want and I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out here a little bit so I can see exactly what's going on. I'm gonna snap that right there, okay? Then I'm gonna move over. Now I've kind of predefined this a little bit so it makes it a little bit easier for us to figure out what's going on. So I'm gonna type in 15 right there.

01:53

15 down and come over here and I'm gonna make sure we snap that to the horizontal. This one here, I'm just gonna snap down here. I'm not gonna put a dimension quite yet. Come over here, let's add an angle to this thing and then bring it all the way back to the original starting point there. Now, we've added a few dimensions, but we wanna add a few more to kind of define the shape of this thing. So I'm gonna hold down, turn off the line command by hitting escape.

02:19

I'm gonna hold this, click on this bottom line here, hold down shift on my keyboard, I'm gonna select these two lines here. I'm gonna type in that value there, so I want 120. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on that one and type in 125 actually. 125, there it is. Oh, actually, you do actually have to hit enter. So let's try that one more time. So here, hit over here, click over there, 125, hit enter and there it is. My height, I'm gonna click on this line right here, hold down shift and select that guy down there.

02:47

And as far as this dimension here, that wants to be 35. So 35 right there. Boom, that moves over there. And then the point, that point right there, all over here to the center line. Notice, where's our center line? So here's our center line right here. So I'm gonna call down Shift and select that center line. And this value here wants to be 125, boom. The last thing we need to define is the center hole. So I'm gonna choose this line here.

03:14

hold down shifts, choose the center line, and those happens to be five millimeters right now. I actually want it to be 16.891. So click on that one there. So I'm gonna click on that and say 16.891. And that happens to be the perfect size to fit on a one inch piece of pipe. So I calculated that out or figured that out earlier. So we now know exactly what that dimension is. Again, if you don't hit enter, it actually does not work, believe it or not.

03:44

So let's try that one more time. And here it is, is 16.891. Hit enter this time, and there it is. It moves right over there and everything's looking pretty solid. Okay, so that is the shape that I wanna revolve around. Okay, and I'm gonna hit revolve on the keyboard. So if I just hit anywhere else out of here, of course I can slide things around a little bit here, but I'm gonna hit R on the keyboard for, no, no I'm not. What am I doing here? Let's do, let's go back. All right, so.

04:14

Move this back to the center of the screen here. So now we are no longer gonna be, we're gonna exit sketching, so now we're not in that anymore. And we're gonna go down here to tools and we're gonna go and do a revolve. So revolve happens to be V. It would make sense if it was R, but R for rectangle also kinda makes sense. So we're gonna go ahead and choose revolve right over here. And first thing it's gonna ask is, hey, what do we wanna revolve around? I wanna revolve that thing right there. And what is the axis that I wanna revolve around? I'm gonna choose that center axis right there.

04:44

And right that easily, I already have my shape and it's looking pretty good. The only problem is I don't wanna go all the way around. Notice right here it says 360. If I click right there, I can type in something like 45. 45 degrees, that's gonna give me a one piece of the pie. I want eight individual bins and 45 degrees is gonna give me exactly what I'm looking for. So go ahead and click on the checkbox, there it is. And now I've got that shape. So right over here, here's my items. I'm gonna go ahead and hide that sketch.

05:12

So now I'm just looking at that one there. Now we got a couple things we probably want to do at this point. Number one is we want to add a little radius to the bottom. So I'm gonna click on this, spin it around. I'm gonna click on that edge right there and I'm gonna drag out that fillet, right? So I'm gonna type in something like 30 and it gives us a nice little fillet at the bottom, looking pretty good. And now we want to do a shell, right? We want to shell this thing out so it's all hollowed out. So I'm gonna go ahead and come over here to some different tools.

05:40

And one of those happens to be shell. So right over here, it's also H on your keyboard. Click on shell. I'm gonna choose that top surface that I wanna get rid of that. I'm gonna type in three millimeters is the thickness of the shell that I want. Click okay. And now I've shelled that out. So now I have this nice little bin. Everything's looking pretty good, right? So, it's pretty good so far, so far. But if I was gonna like 3D print this thing or mold this thing.

06:07

you're probably gonna have a problem with this kind of like hollow section, because it's hollow inside of here now. If you can't see that, I can go over here and choose the appearance and show hidden edges, and that will allow us to kind of see in there a little bit. You can see that this is actually kind of hollowed out inside there, and that may be a problem for us. We also want some extra strength in this area, because that's kind of gonna be the hub. This thing could be kind of heavy. So we wanna kind of fill that area in. So let's go ahead and turn that back off. So I'm gonna go to appearance.

06:35

and show hidden edges, turn that off. Now what I wanna do is I wanna create a shape like this one right here. I wanna like drag it up or I wanna go up. If you go down, notice it goes the wrong direction. So we're gonna be creating a new shape. Click okay and then leave that shape. So now here's my face offset. But that's really not what I wanna do. I don't wanna offset the face. I actually wanna create a new extrusion but instead of going up, I wanna go down. So that's not what I wanna do. Let's go ahead, right click and hit delete.

07:04

This time I'm gonna choose this one here. I'm gonna say, hey, I wanna create a sketch, right? That's that sketch I wanna work on right here. And then I wanna hit E for extrude. So now what I wanna do is I wanna take this value here, this body, I wanna move it down, I wanna extrude it. So because I'm going down this way, notice something weird happens? I'm gonna go up first, right? And click OK. So I've created this thing by going up and now I've got this new extrusion right over here that's adding this piece here.

07:33

But in reality, I wanna go down, because the way the software's working is it thinks I'm gonna try to subtract things if I go down. So I wanna go up first, but then I wanna go over here to the history bar. Click on this over here, and I wanna say, hey, I wanna go a distance, right? But instead of a typed in distance, I wanna say up to an object. And I say, hey, I wanna actually go down here to this bottom, right? So that's what I wanna go down to. So if I go over here, I want to say, hey, I want to do a up to object.

08:01

And I wanna choose up the object, I'm gonna fix that thing. I'm gonna choose the object. Okay, click on done. So now it's gonna bring that face and bring it all the way down to the bottom. That kind of solves the problem, right? First we had to go up, then we gotta go down. It's a little bit of work around, but it allows us to quickly create the shape and then use that history bar to modify the shape so it does exactly what we're looking for. Okay, now I've got that shape, it's looking pretty good. Now the next thing I wanna do is I wanna spin this thing around. Now...

08:29

Remember I told you I wanted to have this kind of uniform wall thickness of three millimeters everywhere. So right now this top surface here, or the front is three millimeters, the bottom is three millimeters. This is a thicker section here, but we could hollow that out from the bottom or something like that if you're gonna mold it or something like that. But I do want that to be a thicker section, so I wanna keep that one separate. But what about when I spin this thing around, because these sidewalls both happen to be three millimeters, when I pattern it, those are actually gonna end up being six millimeters because I'm gonna be doubling up the walls.

08:59

So what I wanna do is I actually wanna thin out those walls now before we spin them around. So I'm just gonna choose this wall here. I'm just gonna move this over a little bit. And notice if I move it too far, it just kinda gets rid of it. I'm gonna type in 1.5 as the distance I wanna move it over. And then I wanna do the exact same thing over here. I wanna grab that guy here and just kinda slide it right over, just a little bit. Hold on. 1.5 millimeters, which happens to be half the thickness. And notice that wall and that wall are pretty thin. But you'll see when we spin this thing around,

09:27

that it makes everything a three millimeter wall thickness. Okay, now you can guess the next thing we're gonna do is a revolve. So our friend over here, if we click on some of the different tools we have and we have this thing called a, actually we're not doing a revolve, we're actually gonna be doing a pattern, right? It's a revolved pattern. And so we actually need to be over here and here's our pattern. Click on pattern, we have a couple of options. We have a linear pattern or a circular pattern. Click on circular.

09:54

Right, and it's asking us for what are the bodies, right? So which body? I wanna use that body, and then I wanna revolve around something, right? So it's asking what I wanna revolve around. Well, I need to use this little point here. I wanna drag this over here to the origin, right? And then I'm gonna spin this thing around. Notice if I spin it around, notice what I get, I get all these different options here. So it's asking me, hey, what's this angle here? So I'm gonna say 360. I wanna go all the way around, plus or minus, doesn't really matter. And how many, right?

10:24

because I want this thing to be fully filled up, right? And then that's looking pretty good, right? So click on the green, or not the green checkbox, but blue checkbox, there it is. And there's my shape, right? Everything's looking pretty good. Now notice we have a bunch of individual bodies. Here's all our different bodies right here. And of course, in this state here, you can hide and show these bodies and see what you've got going on here, which is pretty handy. But we really wanna bring all these together. We wanna make one part.

10:51

Okay, so what we wanna do is come down here to some tools. So we've got some tools down here and one of them happens to be the Boolean Union, right? So we wanna click on Union, click on this one here and we wanna bring these together. So Boolean is a, you can add things, you can subtract things, you can do a bunch of things here. But if I choose this face here, that one there, and I'll just choose these bodies as we go around, it's going to be bringing these things together, click OK and now we have one individual part.

11:21

Okay, so a couple more things we may wanna do at this point, we might want to add a couple of fillets, things like that. So you've got a pretty sharp edge out here, if you look at that edge. Yeah, you probably don't wanna have that sharp edge here. So let's click on that edge itself and the fillet, we wanna just kinda bring in like, you know, something like that, like a little one millimeter fillet, just fine. Same thing on this inside edge here. I can choose actually all those, if I hold down Shift and just kinda work around the shape.

11:51

here, let's go zoom in a little bit, pick that edge, pick that edge, and sometimes you've got to spin it around a little bit or zoom in if we want to get all those little edges. There's the last one right over there, and then my fillet, I can of course, I can drag this little arrow here, and I think just like one millimeter is going to be fine for that, so one millimeter fillet inside and out, both looks pretty good. All right, so there is my fillet on the inside.

12:19

Now of course you could fill it in here, you could fill it down here, you could fill around wherever you want. But right now that's looking pretty solid, you know, looks like a pretty good shape. Now of course we want these to stack and we want to kind of take a look at what that's gonna look like, right? So we wanna use another pattern. In this case, come down here again to some of the transform tools. Here's our pattern, but at the same time, instead of doing a circular pattern, we actually wanna switch, click on the little drop down here and click onto linear.

12:47

And it's gonna ask us, what do we want to pattern? Well, I want to pattern that body, and I want to go up, right? And of course, you can define how many things you'd like to pattern. And I want to choose something like the front face so I can see exactly what's going on here. And you can see, okay, here's my pattern, of course, here's my 3X, here's my spacing. But you can just use the arrows and just kind of drag this thing up and down. You can see like right about there. Wait, a little bit, a little bit up. There it is.

13:18

Okay, pretty good. Of course, get those things lined up so that's about what you're gonna look like and then click okay. All right, now you can spin that around. You can say, hey, does that look pretty good? Like I kinda get my fingers in here to get these components out. Do we need to add a little more spacing? What do we need to do? How many more of these things can I stack up? Figure out exactly how high this whole thing's gonna be when you get done. You know, adjust the sizing, adjust the filleting, a bunch of things. And you might say, hey, you know, instead of eight little boxes, maybe I'd like to have four or maybe just want two.

13:47

or maybe I want 16, you know. Whatever that angle is, doesn't matter. Of course, we can just do the exact same thing just by going back here in the history bar and taking a look at some of these revolves. Obviously, my first little revolve has to be whatever that segment of the pie is gonna be. If it's gonna be 30 degrees or 45 degrees, maybe it's 90 degrees, I don't know, whatever it is, figure that out and then of course, it has to have a matching revolve or pattern that would make the full amount of pieces around. But.

14:14

Bunch of things you can do there. And then of course, if you're happy with what you have, you wanna see how it might look as far as like if you rendered it, you can switch over here to visualization and we can drag and drop some different materials and things like that. So I can say, hey, I wanna put a ABS on the top here or I wanna come down here and apply some other colors. I wanna say, you know, let's put black over here, maybe some blue over here and now we've got a shape that looks like that. Looks pretty nice.

14:43

and you can see how that would all come together. Of course, this would be great for 3D printing or just playing with and if you're doing some hobbies or you have a lot of little small parts like nuts and bolts and screws, this is a great way to keep them all organized. So hopefully this project has been informational for you and hopefully maybe you can build a part like this and use it in your shop or in your workshop or in your crafting station, whatever happens to be your flavor of entertainment. Anyways, thanks for watching and check back soon.