modular parametric drying rack

Modular parametric drying rack rails

official location in this git repository:
 https://gitlab.com/wjcarpenter/3dprinting
BSD 2-Clause License

There are many designs for drying racks (for plates, dishes, cups, glasses, pot lids, and on and on) that are some kind of base rails with rods of some kind sticking up in the air. But you might need one that has different dimensions, or you need to make one that is bigger than your print bed can handle. This design tries to handle those various problems by allowing you to break things up into pieces that fit together with dovetails (maybe friction fitting will be good enough, or maybe you need a drop of CA glue).

You can have as many parallel rails as you want, separated by crossbars of whatever length you want. If that ends up wider than your printer can handle, you're out of luck with this design.

You can have as many rail segments as you want to make the rack as long as you want. If that's longer than your print bed can handle, you can use different configurations to break things up in to chunks that can then fit together with dovetails. There is no limit to how long you can make the joined rails, except for your own patience in printing them.

There are holes in the exact middle of each rail segment for the pin/rod/dowel that you want to insert. The holes can go all the way or only part way through the rail segment. It's also possible to show rods in those holes, either just for preview or in the final render. So the choice is yours whether to do the rods separately or include them with the rail prints. There is no "just the rods" thing here because here are plenty of designs available for rods of various kinds elsewhere. If you need really long ones, they can be very tricky to print; you can waste a lot of time and filament trying. If they are too hard to print, either separately or as part of the rails, you could do what I did and use round unsharpened pencils or dowels from a hardware store.

You can suppress the dovetail stuff on either end of a run of rail segments, and the remaining rail ends can be either squared off or rounded. This is typically what you want for the ends of the rails. In case you are not familiar with the terminology of dovetails, the "tail" is the piece that sticks out, and the "socket" is the cutout where a tail fits. A dovetail is an isosceles trapezoid with a wide end and a short end, and the length is the distance between those two ends.

Of course, all of the dimensions are parametric. I tried to use liberal constraints on all the numbers. If you need something outside my ranges, you can modify this design file and run OpenSCAD locally.