Design Of The Week: Modular Bottle Rack

This week’s selection is the Modular Bottle Rack by YouMagine contributor Gabor Penoff.

Wine is a very popular beverage across the globe, and many people have at least several bottles of their favorites on hand at home.

These bottles are stored using wine racks, which are commonly available in household supply outlets. But there’s sometimes a problem: the pre-made bottle racks make assumptions about the nature of the bottles being stored.

Bottles can differ in several ways, although most are close in dimensions. You can find bottles with different diameters, for example, and some with different lengths.

Thus it a frequent scenario is finding your pre-made bottle rack doesn’t actually fit your entire collection of bottles.

There are two choices at this point: open and drink the bottles that don’t fit, which could be a very good option, or use 3D print the Modular Bottle Rack.

Penoff explains:

“I have generated STLs for different bottle diameters from 80 to 120 mm in 5 mm increments but you can also customize it by changing the “d_bottle” parameter in the Fusion 360 CAD file. BTW for me, the 90 mm seems to be the most universal size.

The rack is 80 mm long (this, as well as everything else, is also parametric) because I wanted to save as much plastic as I can.”

This design is not only modular, in that they fit together, but also parametric, in that you can change the diameter of the bottle holding element.

The modularity enables you to 3D print a series of single bottle holders to properly fill a vacant space in your residence much more accurately than you could with a pre-made bottle rack. You can imagine differently shaped bottle racks using the modular approach: you might have a very tall 12 x 2 composition, for example, to fill a skinny space.

The one catch with this design is that to use the parametric capability you must have an Autodesk Fusion 360 account to load, open and modify the file. For many readers, this should not be a problem, as Fusion 360 is becoming increasingly popular.

This is an excellent example of how to best leverage 3D printing: developing a customized solution that everyone has.

Via YouMagine