I made two units. This picture shows them stacked in "shelf mode" with the lids in between the fucking shelves.
This is a top down view of the units separated and rotated on their backs for trunk mode. One of them has the lid in place, the other has the lid laying over the opening:
As I expected the fit is extremely tight because the pieces are design to fit perfectly and its a vertical drop. So for the next version I will probably need to introduce a slope to the piece edges that go inside each other.
As simple as this looks this design is actually incredibly complicated--there are a ton of edges and, as I discovered with my first prototype, a surprising number of them need to be matched perfectly. Oh, you know what? According to wikipedia these little ridges are called flanges. Honestly that might be the first time I heard that word used correctly.
In addition to the sloping I need to also figure out how the trunk lids will be secure. It kind of defeats the point if you have to get the packing tape out. Deciding how to secure depends on first deciding whether to make it out of wood, plastic or metal. Which brings us to the part that I know almost nothing about.
Oh shit...AND it needs handles. Each side of each unit will need two: one facing up in shelf mode, and one facing up in trunk mode. They should probably be recessed for better stacking. And we might want something even fancier to facilitate turning them sideways while the contents are still inside (since that is the whole point of this).
[Update]
Adding slopes has been more difficult than I thought. So now I'm really just working my way down this list.
TinkerCAD doesn't seem to have a crop feature, so that's out.
I tried OpenSCAD which is cool because it is based on a language that says where to place things, except it has hardly any primitives to work with and its other functions (e.g. linear_extrude) are so sparse that I would have to hand-program even basic 3d shapes (like wedge, or flat pyramid). So that's gonna be a last resort. OpenSCAD links:
- first tutorial I found
- cheat sheet listing all the stuff
- linear extrude
- how to make your own "modules"
Currently trying FreeCAD.
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