Condiment Shelf Project

After being duly humbled by the complexity of the planetary gears project, I decided to back off a bit and tackle something simpler. While cooking in the kitchen, inspiration struck as I poked around in the cabinets looking for the condiments I wanted: let's organize this thing.

This is a problem space ideally suited for 3D printing: Low-volume problem solving. Everybody's kitchen layout is different, starting from the cabinet dimensions to the selection of spices and condiments to how much a person uses each spice in their preferred meals.

Naturally, I quickly dropped into the rabbit hole of devising a grand master plan to completely organize the kitchen cabinets. It took a while before I reminded myself: "Hey, remember when we decided to do something smaller and simpler?"

Right, that. Let's get back to that.

The first item with immediate usefulness is a way to keep the sugar and salt containers in a way that keeps them accessible, standing above the fray of the other little jars and bottles. The few initial versions focused on building stack-able jar cubicles, but that ran into problems as the dimensions approach the maximum print size of my little printer.

Retreating yet further, I decided the vertical dimension support can be accomplished via some threaded rods and nuts I can buy at Home Depot. I only need to deal with the horizontal dimension - the shelf itself. The threaded rods are the vertical posts, they go through the small holes in each corner of the shelf. The shelf is then held in a particular position by the nuts on each of the rods.

Successfully reducing the problem down to basics gave me a small shelf that is quick to print and solves the problem. No more time-consuming huge cubes, just a small slice of plastic. It's simple, it's fast, it works.

If you also want to organize jars 9 cm in diameter, you can find this item in the Onshape public document library under the title "Condiment Shelf"