dutchy101 I’d be more than happy to share the file if you have (or have access to) a 3D printer. Drop me an email and I can send it over.
Meldrew I find my 3D printer really useful, but unless you just want to print trinkets off the internet I think it’s essential to learn CAD. Being able to design something for just your need is what really makes it useful.
If you’re interested you could have a go at learning CAD and then once you’ve gained the skills get a printer. I use OpenSCAD (http://openscad.org/). It’s completely free and runs on Linux, windows or Mac. There’s a bit of a learning curve, as you program the model. This makes it really precise though, and very efficient as you can reuse code. You can also load in libraries of other code. Don’t just install it and try to figure it out though, as that would be very frustrating. Instead follow the tutorial in the documentation and you’ll have the basics in no time (https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_Tutorial).
To give you a feel of what it took to design the holder I did the following.
- model the tools
- The WDT tool was just cylinder of the right diameter and height
- The brush was a cylinder of the right height and diameter joined to a truncated cone to flare out the end for the brush (in Openscad this is just a cylinder where you specify two diameters, one for the top circle and one for the bottom). This was then moved across a bit so they are side by side.
- Create the holder
- This was just two cylinders a few mm larger than the largest of the tools. There is a function (called hull) that joins objects together.
- Add the lip that hooks over the edge. This is just two cuboids.
- Remove the model of the tools from the holder
- This is done with a function called difference. It removes one object from another.
