Bead sorting tower, with funnel and tolerance testing tray

I use half-round beads as eyes for printed animals, and when you buy a selection they come in a stupid round box (as shown) and they all jump in together.

Would take forever to sort them by hand, so I've made a bead-sorting tower.  It will separate out 10+mm, 9mm, 8mm, 7mm, 6mm, 5mm, 4mm, 3mm and <3mm (2mm and any broken little bits, basically.)

There are therefore 9 sections for the tower, plus a lid.  I strongly advise using bog-standard PLA for this, as silk can be tricky with small tolerances.  Each mesh is 0.6mm bigger than its bead size, i.e. the 5mm section holes are 4.6mm.  There is a test-tray included, I strongly suggest you print this and test your holes with beads so you can tweak your settings if needs be to get the right hole sizes.

When you've made the sections, screw them together as shown, > at the top down to 3 at the bottom (and then the catch-all tray below that).

Put beads in the top, screw the lid on and shake it a bit.  I found that a mixture of twirling it in your palms and shaking it like a sauce bottle worked well.  Don't put too many in at one go.

Starting from the top, take the lid off and stir the first tray a little bit to make sure they all fell through.  Then screw the funnel on where the lid was, unscrew that whole segment and tip it into your storage bottle.  Repeat for each layer and you're done!  Happy wife etc., and since I am the wife in this case, there's at least one of us :-)

Couple of points:

These little beads are terrible for static.  When you make the tower, use some anti-static spray on every part, which will help (or a tumble-dryer sheet works too, and smells nice!) 

For similar reasons, use a metal spool to stir the sections, otherwise your finger will be covered in little beads!
 

If you have a deformed bead, it might not go through the hole it's meant to and will need to be fished out.  Ditto little broken pieces which will go through to the bottom.

In theory, if you printed enough lids you could put one on each section and use it for storage, since the beads won't go through the holes of course.

I've only got ½ round beads at the moment, but should do just as well with spherical ones.

Would love to see people using this, show me what you've got!