The Hidden Lid Box! (Patreon)

I love lids, as you've probably noticed, and print-in-place ones even more!  But one thing that's often a downside to a printed box with a lid is that unless the box has something heavy in it, opening the lid tends to make it fall over, or at least become poorly balanced.

Lids can also just plain get in the way sometimes.

So, that was the inspiration here!  Could I come up with a design that hides the lid away so effectively that it was like the box didn't have an integrated lid at all?  And of course, since I'm writing this post, the answer is yes!

Somewhere along the way, this box became narrow and square, but the design would lend itself to being made arbitrarily wide, and it should scale up pretty well.  The lid simply has protruding cones at the base that run up a hidden internal track to the top, at which point the lid can rotate forwards, so a little scaled-up looseness won't cause any issues there!

Interestingly, my usual approach of 0.5mm tolerances wasn't quite enough for around the lid, so it's a little wider than usual.  Some of my test prints ended up fusing the lid to the internals of the box, which was terribly sad, let me tell you.  Maybe it was due to tiny movements as the print built up, allowing the still-warm parts to bind slightly over the long length of the lid? 

If you're printing this on a machine with a bed that moves back-and-forth, it's probably good to orient this so that the lid is side-on, i.e. so that the side of the box faces the front of the printer.  That'll minimise the movement of the lid during printing.

As always, if you have any problems, comments, thoughts or anything else, I'd love to hear them!  Put them in the comments here, or join the discord server (see invite link in the post that has the dropbox link).

Creative Printers, you'll find the STL on Dropbox under Hidden Lid Box!

Have fun! :)