Snaplock V3 Thin Remix

I love Hugo's SnapLock cases, but wanted something thinner than his original version allowed. Since he very kindly shared his Fusion file, I downloaded it and remixed it to solve my problem. With that came some additional changes needed to make that work.

Functional changes

• The lid is now just 10mm thick, down from 25mm in the original
• The bottom can be configured from 10mm thick, down from 20mm (smaller was possible but the latches stuck out) so you can now print a 20mm thick SnapLock v3 case.

• To make this work, the latch has been heavily poked and prodded to ensure that 

  A) The latches do not protrude below the bottom of the case 

  B) They scale only as far as the original version in size

  C) The little wings that actually do the latching also scale as required, as a tiny latch with an incorrectly sized wing is very hard to open.

Aesthetic changes

• The supports that angle out for the hinge mechanism and lower half of the latch mechanism have been steepened. This is still well within the realms of printing without issue.
• Some angles here and there have been modified, some to make opening latches easier on thin boxes, some to make it possible to make the design even work.

Fixes

The model should(tm) not explode when you change parameters. Hard minimums and maximums (where required) have been added to prevent this from happening. I can't say its 100% sorted but I tried really hard to break it! If you enter an invalid value the model will set itself to these defaults, though the parameters on the screen in front of you will not indicate it.

• The minimum width (left to right) is set to 70mm
• The minimum length (back to front) is set to 20mm
• The minimum height of the bottom of the box is set to 10mm.
• The corner radius can be set between 5 and 25mm. This will also automatically adjust if the length is set too small. IE, you can't have a 30mm length and a 25mm corner radius, so the model will automatically adjust the radius to 15 if you have set a higher number than this.

Further, changes have been made to stop random bits of geometry appearing on occassion, depending on the parameters set.

Now what?

Just like the original, my fusion file is attached, take it, remix it to make cases that fit your needs with internal mouldings or partitions or whatever. 

Open either the Master or Flattened file in the configurator. After using the Parametric Model Maker, download the 3mf or stl, open it and split the model to objects. If you have used the Flattened version the parts will already be in the correct orientation for printing, you will just need to arrange them to suit. 

If you used the Master file then rearrange the parts so that the lid is printing top down, and the latches are printing face down. 

The seal is entirely optional, I don't bother with it myself. Print in TPU.

Sadly, Bambu does not add the model to a new plate in the profile I supply, so either download the 3mf and make the changes yourself, or download the profile and the STL, and import the file into the 3mf.

I just use a standard 0.2 layer, 8% gyroid infill and 3 walls with arachne walls for my printing and that is what is in the profile for the demo print.

As always, the latches are best printed in something that will spring back properly like PETG rather than PLA. They work fine in PLA, but longevity may suffer.

I did all this to house a £7 set of tap spanners, the nice red one in the photos. Enjoy!