Cable/Cord Winder Print in Place Pucks Stack-able

In this in-depth Instructable along with (40 Screen shots) I will guide you through the process of how I would go about designing and 3D Printing a really useful Stack able Cable/Cord Winder Puck.

I designed some of these pucks recently and they work extremely well, a friend would like some but unfortunately I had deleted the files on Fusion 360 I could have printed from the print files but I thought why not create from scratch an Instructable as the Winders feature many of the tools available within Fusion 360.

There are a few winders out there but not many that I could find that show any of the design stages, I will try my best using the screen shots the way I would design these winders.

With my hobbies, I like many have amassed a fair amount of cable/cords and these consist mainly of Mobile phone charging cables, you know the ones! 1 meter long Be it Android, Google, Iphone or whatever, these cables can be an issue to manage and they just look a mess.

With these cable/cord winder pucks they are stack able, for everyday use or going on vacation/holiday, no problemo, select the Winders that you need from the stack and pack them away easily in a suitcase, push them into shoes etc for smart packing.

When not in use they make a neat stack which doesn't look out of place on a desk or work surface, or easily stowed in a draw, at the very least it keeps them together, it makes the cables easier to distinguish as well as you can see both ends in the winder.

In this design we will also make 2 different types of wall mount for the Pucks plus a wall mount for a mobile phone as well.

I like the thought of print in place models and with this particular design the cable spool and main body are print in place whilst the top component is printed separately as well as the Mounts, which are on a separate build plate.

The features of this model are:

Easy to Print with no supports.

No hardware.

Stack able.

Easy to use.

3D Printer

PLA Filament I used White Marble/Red Marble and Black Sparkle.

Double Sided Adhesive Tape for the Wall mounts

Starting this sketch we create a new component and selecting the front plane we sketch a vertical line 30mm, the inner spool of the winder will be 36mm diameter, so we sketch an horizontal line of 18mm we only need half the total amount as we are using the revolve tool to create a solid.

Thinking about the design we design into the sketch enough room for the wound cable, I will be using 3 Point Arc's to create voids on both the inner and outer sketches.

Look at the first screen shot, when revolved this will create a solid Inner spool, from here we can create the outer part of the winder body, I will use an 0.4mm offset for the bottom of the spool, and also the top part, this will ensure that there is enough clearance for the spool to turn when printed, this is the first part of our print in place design, please take a look at the 2nd screen shot, we can now move onto the revolve tool and turn this sketch into a solid.

In this section we will create solid bodies from the sketches we have created, initially I will start with the inner spool, i will create a new bodies for both inner and outer with this revolve tool but we will be combining both the outer and inner at a later stage.

Using the revolve tool from the solid section, we highlight the section we want to revolve and then use the center vertical line as the axis, please take a look at the screen shots bearing in mind we are saving as individual bodies at this time.

We are splitting the main body to create the lid at a later stage.

In this section we are going to modify the inner spool so that it can accept a cable up to say 4mm which will cater for the braided cables as well.

We will think about the edges of the inner spool and add fillets to protect the cable during the winding process.

First we will create a line with a gentle arc to hold the cable as we wind it in.

There are 2 ways we can make the line wider to our 4mm cable size, one is to off-set the line to 2mm both sides the create lines at the ends to create something which we can extrude down, or the easiest way is from the solid section select pipe, instead of circular select the square option and make a cut with this, then extrude the slot down to where we want it, see the screen shots for clarification.

At this stage we can add fillets to the edges of the slot to ease the winding process and also less stress on the cable or cord.

The next thing we can do is add the winding handles, these are also the means of stacking the winders.

I created 2 circles equal distances from the center of the spool and then I extruded these to 5mm there is a wheel at the top of the extrude and you can use these to create a taper in or out, I did this and then filleted the lower and top edges.

With this component complete we can now move onto the main body, we need to not only split this but we need to add recess's for the cable.

In this section we need to create a top for the winder, this is so we can remove it, insert the cable and then replace before winding.

To do this we need to split the main body, this is simpler than it sounds, turn off the inner spool body at this point.

Start a new sketch on the center plane and create a horizontal line to the outer limits of the main body, we will use this line to split the body and to do this we use the split body tool, select the body and then the line as the cutting tool, you will now have 2 bodies the lower and upper, turn off the upper body and the next task is to create the cut outs for the cable, to do this start a new sketch and select the top face to sketch to, create a 4mm rectangle to the outer limits of the main body, then extrude this down to the bottom of the spool.

I went a bit further and added a hole to each side of the slot to ease cable winding, I filleted all the areas for a smoother operation.

We can now turn our attention to the top component.

With this component we need to create a means of securing the top to the main body and to do this we select the inner face of the top and create a center circle midway between the outer and inner, we will use the pipe tool again and create a 2mm square and joined this to the top, I extruded this a further 0.5mm and fillet the edges.

We can now turn on the main body and use the top to cut the slot into the main body using the combine tool, as we need to keep both components we use the cut function with the "Keep tools" box ticked and this will retain both pieces.

We will now have a groove in the main body where the lid will fit.

The last thing we can do with the main body is to add a means of holding the winder, when handling the winder.

I opted for some vertical grippers and to do these we need to create an off-set plane from the center plane and take this to the outer edge of the winder, select this plane to create a sketch, I created a central end to end slot 2mm diameter and 10mm length for this, I then used the emboss tool to emboss the slot to the body at 0.3mm depth, I added fillets to finish, from here we can use the pattern on path tool to create copies of the embossed slot around the circumference of the body, I highlighted the faces of the embossed slot and chose the edge of the circumference of the body as a path, and created 8 copies in each direction of 38mm length, these will aid in the gripping of the winders as well as addinf substance to the design.

The last thing to do is to make these winder pods stack able.

We only need the inner spool for this part of the project, but first we will turn the 3 bodies into components and name them, this will condense into 2 components when we end this design.

With only the inner spool component selected in the browser, we click copy, and then at the top of the browser where it says Cable Winder V2 we right click and paste new, this will create another spool, using the down arrow, pull this down to the bottom of the original, it snaps into place at the bottom of the top winder, we can then use this copy to cut out the winder holes in the bottom of the original so we can stack the winders.

We don't need the copy, but I used combine and cut and ticked the keep tool box again and removed the copy from the browser later.

There are 2 ways we could make a Wall mount for the Winders and one is to use the winder handles, we could split a copy of the spool body and create a mount using the handles, the alternative way is to create a cup which will hold the winder in place, it doesn't need to be a tight grip, just something to hold the Winder in place at say a phone charging point.

With this design I went with using the handles as a wall mount, the winder will just be a push fit onto the mount.

To use, you would pull out as much cable/cord as needed and then place the winder on the mount.

The phone wall mount is a rectangular box 80 x 20mm and this is off-set 1.5mm

It was then extruded to 60 mm or whatever height you want really, this was saved as a new body and then selecting the front face I created a new sketch and sketched a vertical line from the bottom to the top, I created a 3 point arc from top to the bottom and created a radius, mirror this to the center line and then did an extruded cut of 18mm so not all the way through, this will add strength to the mount.

I highlighted the mount and filleted to whatever I could get away with and this was 0.7mm I then chose the front face again and sketched in some lines to one side of the mount and used the pipe tool again to create some semi circular extrusions to the face of the mount, I filleted these to 0.3mm I then created an off set plane of 40mm from the inside edge of the mount and mirrored the modified side, this completed the Wall Phone mount, my phone is an Iphone X but select the rectangle dimensions to the width and depth of your phone, its the same design process.

The final part of this project is to combine the inner spool and the main body so we can print them as one, hence the print in place part of the design.

To do this, we have only the inner spool and main body in the display, right click on the Cable Winder V2 at the top of the browser and save as mesh, from this point we can import the file into the slicer to print in place, I added the top components, I created a 2nd build plate for the Wall mounts and phone mount as these are optional.

I printed 6 x Winder Pucks using white/Red marble PLA and Black Sparkle PLA and a Wall and phone mount in White Marble/Red marble

I hope this Instructable shows through the screen shots and description ways in which you can create some really useful components.

A lot of the time we can make Fusion 360 work for us using the tools within the software.

I'm no expert by any means but after a very steep learning curve I feel confident that I can guide people through some of the processes within Fusion 360 and some of the disciplines within the software.

In this instructable we have created sketches, extruded to make solids, we have used many of the design tools ie Extrude, Fillet, Revolve, Mirror, Create Pattern, Emboss, Pipe, Split body, Combine etc etc.

Good Luck to everyone who has a go at designing these very useful winders, the print files are attached should anyone wish to use them.

Thanks for Looking.