As I am not sure what is the exact limitation for printing a big watertight box in parts, I tried after a suggestion of @nallath to design a box that is printable on a normal 200mmx200mm 3D printer:
There are four parts for the bottom and four for the top. All parts are overlapping for easy glueing.
Let me know if it works or what you think should be changed in the design.
Wow! Is this 3D printed? It certainly does not look like it
I am interested in the structural rigidity of the end result. A big piece of the current box is the single-piece rigidity that it offers to the overall assembly. Do you think we may be able to achieve the same thing using 3D printed parts?
This is PLA printed with a ultimaker 2. I’ve printed it at the fastest settings layer wise (the layer thickness is 0.2). It can do better than this
The only problem is that the prints take quite a bit of time to complete and are almost impossible without heated bed, due to warping (even with PLA, the bottom will warp a lot). So you would be hard pressed to print this with a vanilla ultimaker original.
It does feel pretty solid. Im not able to break it with my hands (Yes, I’ ve tried ;)). PLA by nature won’t stand impacts very well and it’s not water tight without treatment. All in all, i’m pretty confident this should work. I will try to print another few parts to see how sturdy it is when i glue them together.
Hello. Last 2 days, myself and @azisi, inspired from this tread, we are designing a new 3d printable box. We design it from scratch and not coping existing ABB box. We made it smaller so the RF electronics will be in an other, shielded, box. For this reason now the internals are not symmetric, azimuth axis now on the left. I ll attach a sketch presenting what we have in mind. The box will be closing, frond and back using two sheets of Plexiglas like material and an o-ring. The smaller dimensions we manage to achieve are 240x250x110mm. This is printable as one piece in some 3D printers. If you want to try or have suggestions the source and the stl files are in our reppo under the “3d_printable_case” branch. We try to print it in our printer by cutting it into pieces. We will come up with more pics soon. Because I am sure I forgot to tell something I 'll reply again later We are waiting your comments. (if someone has a 3d printer with bigger print volume and have time, patience, material and want to give it a try we will be thankful)
WOW! Thanks a lot nallath for trying this We now need to know how it works assembled!
Also when (and if) you can it would be great to give a chance on the new design. Once again thanks for being part of our R&D efforts towards a better solution!
We are waiting your comments. (if someone has a 3d printer with bigger print volume and have time, patience, material and want to give it a try we will be thankful)
The printed box!