At some point, not sure when or how, but the little plastic caps that cover the business ends of my mortiser chisels decided to take a permanent break and leave my shop. Most likely got sucked up by the shop vac and are painfully slowly decomposing in the local landfill. Now my mortiser chisel holder holds them in an upright fashion to prvent the auger part of the bit from falling out, right next to my air compressor with the tips of the bits just about forearm / wrist high. Making every single reach for the air compressor on / off switch a bit of an excersize in fear factor.
Not wanting to trade in what years I might have left on this earth for a Darwin award, I felt it best to replace these covers. Unfortunately it's not like these are just an every day thing I can just order on Amazon, oh no they want to sell me the whole chisel set...
But... I DO happen to have a 3d printer, albeit a small cheap one, but guess what, it is perfect for whipping out this sort of thing.
So I go looking on the various STL publishing sites, and sadly nobody has published any print files for these little plastic boxes, but I have calipers, I have Sketchup, and I know how to use 'em...
Design #1. The measurement is there and works well, BUT, only for the 3/8" chisel which I allowed a tiny bit of slop. The 1/2 and 1/4" chisels that I set the inside dimension of the caps dead on to, well, that was dumb.
Design #2. I upsized the 1/4" and 1/2" while keeping the 3/8" cap the way I had it. No joy. Let's try something different.
Designs #3 - 7. Change template in Sketchup from woodworking inches to 3D printing mm. Whip the calipers out again and re-measure everything in MM, transfer the measurements to the drawing. I literally hit the 3/8 cap legth wise dead in the middle... Nailed the 1/2" on the first print, had to fudge around in tenths of a mm to get the 3/8 and 1/4 to fit right but I got it... tenths of a mm, that's not thousandths, but it is an ever so slight nudge...
Well after much trial, fitting, error, fixing, trial fitting blah blah blah, I got them to fit, finally...
I posted the design up on Thingiverse https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5430191/files so if any of you are up to 3D printing knock yourselves out, I am sharing it with a non commercial attribution license. So feel free to make stuff from it, but don't sell the same said stuff...
Popping them off of the raft is pretty easy, and again, not super tight, but definately a friction fit, at least with mine. Odds are good that chisel sizes may vary. Heaven knows the Central Machinery chisels are not super accurately machined....
So now that I have done this, I am posting this up hoping that maybe someone else can benefit from what I have done here....
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