Magazine / brochure notebook holder

This was a really quick design, perfect for 3D printing. We have some booklets that are too small to stand up on a shelf on their own, and it would be great to stick them in a notebook. Imagine something that was printed on 11"x17" paper and then staple-bound in the middle to make an 8.5"x11" booklet. My wife was familiar with a product made for holding magazines or brochures in a notebook, and found and example on line. A simple sketch-extrude project in Fusion 360. I designed and printed one, then decided we could print it thinner and make some cutouts to save time and plastic.

Only one problem: this would push the limits of the bed on my Robo3D R1+, and as I've written before, the far edges of the bed don't heat well. That could cause ends to curl or cause the whole thing to come loose. So as I did with the Face Mask project, I created little "brims" which make the narrow ends a little bigger. With more surface area, ends stick better. I make them as independent parts, and then drag and rotate them into place on the virtual bed so they *just* contact the model. 

This results in narrow joints that snap off easily.

Here's the product in real life. It prints in 20 minutes and costs 19 cents to make.

And how it works in the notebook.

Shelf support brackets for Ikea Ekby Bjärnum products

We have a lot of Ikea cabinets and shelving in our office. To accomodate a window replacement, we needed to move a shelf down, but that would put it too close to the desk. The supports for the "Ekby Bjärnum" shelves are T-shaped, with the shelf in the middle and a bracket going up and a bracket going down. I figured I could reclaim some of the space by making a version with only the bracket going down, thereby placing the shelf at the same level as the window. Ikea no longer sells this line, though others do on Amazon, but no one seemed to make a one-sided support like I envisioned.

I designed a support that looks nearly like the Ikea one, but with a screw hole inside and some diagonal bracing below to make up for the loss of the bracket above. I knew that this would be experimental because plastic would be less strong than steel, but we were only planning to put small notebooks and lightweight objects on the shelf. There are little threaded holes on the underside for set screws. Zoom in on the pic if you want to see details of the support or holes.

The Ekby supports come in left and right "end" versions and a "middle" version. The shelf slips in from one side, and the support hides the cut end of the shelf. So I designed one "end" version and then mirrored it in the slicer. Then I reused parts of the "end" version to make the "middle" version, and relocated the bottom hole. But the shelf hole on the bottom would require support... so I printed this in two mirrored halves and super-glued them together.

If the support were to be flush with the window it needed to accommodate the trim boards. With the original Ikea supports I had made wooden shims to fill the gap. To deal with the new trim I copied the profile of the moulding and measured the space under it to the wall. Here's the resulting profile. Because this is custom to my window trim, I'm not uploading this to Thingiverse. If anyone wants a copy I could upload the Fusion 360 file and they could customize it.

In retrospect I should have moved the upper hole outward a bit, because it was difficult to angle the screwdriver adequately. It worked, but it was hard.

The resulting brackets were certainly strong enough for light loads. They twisted a bit from side to side, but once the shelves went in they did not move. Ultimately we did not end up using them, because the shelf was judged to be too close to the desk, and we don't have that much short stuff to go under it. Better to lose the shelf and just put the notebooks on the desk.