Regulation Tape Caddy

Have you ever tried printing a blade?  Wait, no incriminating answers, please!  I mean, some thing for stationery purposes, since we're looking at another component for the Regulation Caddy System.  Specifically: a tape caddy!

Now, this thing works mostly quite well!  The screw-in spool holder retains the spool and allows the tape to be pulled out and over the top.  Angles are all arranged so there's plenty of room for a standard tape roll, but of course without requiring supports during printing.  So, what's the problem?  Well, blades!

See that there?  It's a printed blade!  It prints flat, with an attempt at corrugation, but at least with PLA there's really no chance of getting a reliable, durable blade that will cut tape.  

So, what I did (not shown in these pics) is grabbed a roll of cling wrap (that's Glad wrap, Saran wrap, plastic wrap or food wrap, depending on where you happen to live), and cut off a little section of the in-built metal serrated blade, and wedged that in.  And that worked nicely!  There are probably plenty of similar blade-type things that could be used like that, but you probably don't want to use anything that would slice fingers...

Printing Tips

Everything's designed for support-free printing, and there are no tricky aspects to this model.  You'll want to make sure your dimensional accuracy is reasonably good seeing as parts need to fit into each other, but the tolerances are very generous anyway.

The parts print like so:

File Location

You'll find this on dropbox under:

798 Regulation Caddy System / tape caddy

(dropbox post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31697592 )

Final Thoughts

This was certainly fun to develop, but I do wish there was a better way to approach the whole blade thing... maybe that's something to explore in later projects - how to incorporate blades into functional designs without turning them into injury machines... :)

Enjoy!

xoxo

Sven.