Gallery Box

Design in Fusion 360; 3D Printing; Gallery Box decoration

For the final project, I would like to create a gift-shaped hollowed house that contains a series of furniture. If there’ s more time left, I also plan to create a match box-shaped storage box. The house can be considered as a decorated box. The highlight for this model is the opening and closure of the box.

After the assignment about making a press-fit kit, I want to try more forms of connection fit like a drawer or box in which you can pull or rotate some parts of the module. And one day I came across a cute gift box model which inspired me to design the exterior of the box to be a gift shape. But for the interior design, I plan to go with a small house structure that has hallowed walls with windows.

I used Fusion 360 to design the box part and from my personal experience, it is easier and better to use than Rhino when shaping the 3d solids. The box part can be divided into 3 parts, which are the container, the cap, and the hinge. For the container part, I designed it as walls and floor. So for the floor, there is a concave pattern, which is to simulate what the floor looks like in reality, and for the future benches that I will design as a press kit which can be stuck in the slots. As for the walls, I just design them in normal ways except for the small holes in the walls, which are used for the press-kit part for the frames. The size of the floor is 160x160x5 mm, and the walls' sizes are 160x150x5 mm and 160x154x3mm. The reason why I changed the size of the wall is that the printing time was too long and there were something wrong with the filament which would be distorted sometimes and led to no PLA coming out of the nozzle. Also, the height of the bed was constantly changing while printing, so I had to check the process every 30 min...:C

Therefore, I changed the height of the walls to save more time.

For the starter of this project, I designed a prototype of the hinge part and it turned out well. So for hinge part I just rescale the model. As for the cap of the box, I didn't make the whole model for the same reason-----the printing time was too long. So I only modeled the pieces of the cap and decided to glue them together. Later, I realized that I should also create a press-kit design for the walls and cap pieces connection which may turn out better and cooler...

As for the frame, after designing the basic shape, I added a paper-holder at the back of the frame so that I can change the paintings picture in the frame easily without gluing and pealing. However, when I printed the first frame, the 3D printer did not bring out the holder part and only left a support structure in the center. I later found out the reason which was that the holder thickness was too thin, so I modified its parameters and it worked.

After the presentation, the class suggested that I should consider making a press-fit module for my rest parts. Therefore, when I designed the hinge and door, I made a wall with four notches, which were on the inside of the wall for the hinge to insert and fix. Then I designed the hinges with a wide protruding part, a stick and the door with the hinge, so that the door and hinge can be installed on the stick without needing glue to fix. 

However, the print was great but there was some errors when printing out the hinge on the door. Because the support structure for the door was only underneath the flatbed, there was not supporting structure for the curved hinge, which may caused the misprint in hinge.

Because I only have the white PLA, in order to meet the gallery theme, I decided to paint the box. The enamel paints were beautiful but hard to wash off and had a terrible smell. And the surface of the box has a diagonal lines pattern and is kind of smooth, which caused the paints hard to be evenly colored. Originally, I was going to paint the Starry Night on the box cap. However, the paintings took so long to dry and really difficult to blend, the yellow starts became a weird green. So the box cap has been decided to be a tree in the night..

As for the other parts, the painting was relaxing and fun, except for the smell and the paintings being hard to blend. Finally, I painted it out the way I wanted:)

As I mentioned before, the main challenges I came across were the long printing time, PLA getting twisted and "alive", long glue time, and the painting may turn out not ideally. I also need to hurry up to finish the rest parts. So time is also a challenge for me. Additionally, I used glues to connect each part, which took me a long time to fix the box structure and made the box unsustainable and easy to fall apart when I rotated the cap. Apart from the challenges, I think the most important thing I learned from this project is how to use less glue but use more material itself. Therefore, when I reviewed my project, I came up with a design which includes a wrap structure around each corner of the box. This structure will be shaped like a triangle extruding all the way up and has notches on its two sides to get walls fixed in. Although I haven’t tried out this module, I definitely list it as one of this project’s future improvements.