Gridfinity "Fancy" Base

Behold, bowties for days. There is nothing more satisfying than dressing up your Gridfinity baseplates and taking them out to dinner. The goal of this design is to remove screws from existing baseplate designs, reduce the amount of filament needed (those pesky spools cost real money after all), and prepare it for a secret life as a double agent. Better yet, print out the bowtie alone and dress up yourself, get out of the house, and go to a nice restaurant…better yet, better yet, go to a cheap place and spend the money you saved on more filament.

Special thanks to the cyborg Zack Freedman for creating such a satisfying framework.  (I really wanted to spell it Zach to see you explode on video, Zack…because this will make it on a review video one day, right? RIGHT!?)

Talk nerdy to me…

• Clearance between the bowtie and dovetail in the baseplate is ~0.2mm (this means it's a tight fit, you will need to apply some force, Luke…)
• Bowtie is chamfered with a 0.1mm chamfer to help with nothing, it just looks pretty
• ~~Yes a magnetic version is #soontm~~ #itshere!
• ~~Anything larger than a 1x1 is sacrilegious~~
• ~~In your slicer, the bottom of the plate may have been chopped, so check the Z-coord before dicing.~~ - Fixed 17 Jan '23 in rev 3
• Created with the Official FreeCAD 0.20, because I have trust issues with random developers forking and not committing back to upstream…

If you throw enough complaints in comments I might do something like the following…

• Again, people like magnets, so add them to the Nx1 sizes…
• Base version that is height matched to the existing designs…apparently people don't want to throw out what they already made!?

Support me on Ko-Fi!

Change log

rev 7.2 - 17 Apr '23
  - Provided STLs for Slic3R-variants that apparently don't understand that a hole is a hole...
rev 7.1 - 20 Mar '23
  - Re-exported some 3mfs for Slic3r-variants...apparently they don't ignore errors in the 3mfs. Now you get to spend more on bandwidth to download them.
rev 7 - 31 Jan '23
  - Fixed a bug in the FreeCAD 0.20 file that no one asked to have fixed which means parameterization works when M & N are >= 2.
    - Obsoletes rev 3 & 4 version of the file
    - Masochists will appreciate the rev 6 FreeCAD file, others will ignore it, so should you.
  - The power of magnets are added, just like they were added in the last revision, but this time experimental software isn't necesasry...
  - No one cares that you are wearing a bowtie under your suit Clark Kent, only the one on the surface matters - meaning I got rid of the erroneous ones and now you will use more plastic than before.
  - Now with more sizes available
rev 6 - 29 Jan '23
  - Added a 1mm chamfer to the bottom of the 4x5 magnetic plate to address the elephant in the room
  - Speaking of elephants, fixed the dovetail size on the 4x5...
rev 5 - 28 Jan '23
  - 4x5 grid base for magnets that you don't have laying around unless you bought a stupid amount of 6mm x 2mm magnets because you were pulled in by Zack's original design...anyone need magnets by the way? I'm pretty sure I'm on a list now...
  - "New" FreeCAD file for FreeCAD 0.21 extremely-buggy version
  - Less terrible file names
rev 4 - 18 Jan '23
  - 2x4 grid available for the heathens
rev 3 - 17 Jan '23
  - Canceled the appearance on Top Chef, 3mf should now properly render on the cutting board
  - Bowtie just seemed a bit flat, so its now 1mm less flat
  - Parameterized the parameters, you can try on different bowties, as long as they are 1:6 and nothing else
rev 2 - 16 Jan '23
  - Learned that O & / is diameter, not radius...
rev 1 - 16 Jan '23
  - Someone got excited and uploaded this too soon