Chopsticks Shelf "Unforeseen Consequences" by amarand

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Edit 6/19/2017: I changed the cover photo to the super awesome arrangement I made, because no one really cares if you can actually dry pasta with this Thing. They just want eye candy. So here's the eye candy!
Edit 6/16/2017: Uploaded a new cover photo to prove that you can, indeed, use this as a food-safe pasta dryer, especially if you use clean chopsticks!
To quote Cave Johnson from Portal 2:
“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
I made a mistake. In Fusion 360, for some damned reason, threads aren't "modeled" by default. So you put them there, they're looking all pretty, but when you export the STL, there are no threads. It's like, Schrödinger's cat. The cat is alive, the cat is dead. You just can't tell until you get it into the slicer, and by then, it's just too late. No one really checks those things, do they? :)
So I printed it, and instead of screw holes, I just had holes. Or rather, lemons. Lemon holes. But instead of throwing the brackets into the non-recycling bin of sadness, failure and depression, I realized I'd been acquiring a stash of high-quality chopsticks from my local (and utterly fantastic) Korean restaurant chain BIBIBOP (think: Chipotle but with Korean food).
Do you ever go to an Asian restaurant and you feel like, maybe, this is going to be the time you're going to use chopsticks? So you grab a set, or two, or four (depending on how many people are eating), but you also hedge your bets, because you don't want to upset your friends and family who are expecting forks, spoons and knives? So you get both. And although there's inevitably one person - that one guy (or gal) - who uses chopsticks, they eventually switch over to forks and spoons because you can't really get the good stuff on the bottom of the plate/container with chopsticks without looking silly. What ends up happening is one of two things: you're a bastard who doesn't care about the environment, so you just throw that pile of 10 chopsticks into the garbage every time, and they go straight to the landfill, where some landfill woodchuck will use it as a toothpick. Or perhaps you're slightly more concious about the environment, so you ask yourself "is wood recyclable? What about the paper wrapping?" And the answer is "how the heck do I know!?" So you Google it, and find out that the answers differ based on where you live - which continent, state, city and municipality, plus which recycling company you use, or are forced to use, and the cycle of the moon.
More confused than ever, you decide to Google chopsticks, and you find, lo and behold, that there's this chopstick-hoarder on Thingiverse that accidentally designed, of all things, a shelf (perhaps for drying pasta?) that uses 3D printed brackets that you then hammer three chopsticks into, and you're good to go. Wow!
So yeah, I made a strange pasta drying shelf out of a mistake, and now I'm publishing this mistake in the hopes that you, too, can profit from my error and Fusion 360's weird non-modeling defaults.
If you like this shelf, you'll love the real shelves over here:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2368917https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2365549
These actually have screws, screw holes that are properly modeled, and a platform, which will hold things way better than triple-chopsticks.
If you absolutely love this idea, but your chopsticks suck (i.e. are different from my awesome chopsticks from BIBIBOP), please let me know what shape they are (square, circular, triangular, pentagram) and what their dimensions are, and I'll totally make a special version just for you (you beautiful, unique snowflake) and post it here for all to see!
My guess is, there are probably two or three different types of chopsticks that are more commonly found in restaurants, so I'm happy to oblige, to help the greater good.
Lastly, please feel free to leave me comments, because I do read, reply, and try to tweak my designs so they're more awesome. I'm a beginner, but I enjoy learning new things!
"Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I've got some good news and some bad news." Ahh, Cave....