Silica Gel Tower by The_Redcoat

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

An upgrade from using upcycled gelato tubs to hold silica beads in the upper deck of my lack printer enclosure where the open spools live. This container lets the air pass through, and can withstand the re-charge temperatures of my filament dehydrator which means less lost beads & mess.
This is for advanced users only as it requires the use of (provided) slicer modifiers to make some of the model air-permeable. This technique makes the object very printable without thousands of retractions that the alternative slot-based design would require. It was also trivial to model, and the included OpenSCAD file allows you to create one in any dimensions you require.
For the container to withstand re-charge temperatures, it needs to be printed in ABS or other high glass-transition-temperature filament (PETG, ASA, PC etc.). If you recharge silica using an oven and a baking tray or something else not involving the container, then any filament works - clear transparent would be appropriate, so you can see the bead color change.
For the lid, get your first layer bed adhesion sorted out, the infill goes directly on the bed and will make a mess if you aren't calibrated when those lines don't stick. Print slooooow for that first layer, 10mm/s, and with ABS I found increasing the flow to 120% helped.
Recommended infill for the modifiers on the box is: 30% rectilinear at 0 degree rotation.
Recommended infill for the modifiers on the lid is: 30% gyroid at 0 degree rotation.
See screenshots of slicer for what 'works' looks like.
Things I thought about improving, but am too lazy to fix:
Instead of a cube, the box should have been based on the hull of four columns to give it nice rounded corners. ABS loves to try and lift those 90 degree corners off the bed.
For the lid, the modifiers could have been more advanced so the separator support bars exist only in the first 1mm, and last 1mm of layers, and the infill could run all the way along the lid for the layers between those which would have made printing slightly less complex.