Parametric Rugged Vial Box

This is a “rugged box” style vial storage container.  The hinge and latch use a snap fit and so do not require any screws during assembly.

When attaching the top, hold it in the fullest open position and there is a small slot in hinge that makes it easier to snap into place.

The included boxes will hold various counts of 3ml vials.

The included OpenSCAD file can be used to create a custom box to hold any size vial and your choice of rows and columns.  The main OpenSCAD module can also be easily reused in other “rugged box" projects.

Printing tips if the hinges are breaking off at layer lines when snapping on lid:

Hinges on these style boxes stick up higher than the rest of the box and suffer from same issues as the smoke stack on a benchy.  Each hinge layer above top of box can be printed around 1 second and does not have enough time to bond or fully cool off before the next layer is printed.  Types of things in slicer you can change to make the layers stronger and in order they help the hinges the most:

• Decrease part cooling fan speed.
• Increase minimum layer time/slow down print speed setting to 10 seconds.
• Increase hot end temperature by 5 degrees.
• Print slower (but you can achieve this with minimum layer time setting).

Update 2024-05-26: Updated OpenSCAD file to allow custom padding between vials.  This is useful for vials/test tubes with screw on caps and a sample STL for 5ml vials with caps has been added.

Update 2024-10-21: Fix for hinge sizes greater than 4mm.  Increased default hinge size from 4mm to 5mm.

More features have been parameterized, the hinges have been moved outside of box for tighter seal, and the hinge tolerances have been improved to fix the tendency for the top of fall off when the box was open.