If you remember at the beginning of Wall-E, there are the ads that go:
“Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of Space out in Space!
B & L star liners leaving each day!!!..”
The brief was self-assigned: design a carry organizer for the small essentials — chargers, Tylenol, USB drives, backup hardware — that fit the way I actually think about objects. Functional, but worth looking at.
The form came from a bottle of bourbon-aged maple syrup. The structure came from a two-layer printing strategy: an opaque black inner shell, surface-finished to mimic the subtle irregularity of hand-blown glass, then a clear outer shell printed over it. The result reads as glass. It isn't.
The hinge was the real engineering problem. I needed a mechanism that was structurally sound, invisible from the outside, and manufacturable without hardware inserts. The solution was an integrated barrel hinge built directly into the body geometry — the pin can be printed or turned from aluminum rod depending on required durability.
The locking mechanism was harder. The constraint was that it had to be completely flat — no protrusions, nothing that interrupted the bottle silhouette. The final design adapted a toolbox-style latch geometry to fit within the curvature of the form. It's interesting enough to deserve its own writeup, which is coming.
Disciplines:
3D printing · Surface finishing · Mechanical design · Hinge & latch engineering