Magnet Mounted Multi-Sunglasses Rack

When I was a kid, I watched a movie in which the main character kept money in his socks. I don't recall the film, but it's not important. What is important is the lesson I took away from that character: When there is something valuable to you, you keep it in your socks.

So, fast forward 9 years. An adolescent version of me walks out of a Lens Crafters for the first time, $590 poorer, and suddenly keenly and uncomfortably aware of how delicate this tiny collection of metal wire and glass curved and engineered with mathematical precision is—and what an utterly clumsy and forgetful teenager I was. These things were valuable. They let me read the chalkboard, and they were expensive. In fact, at the time, just about the most expensive thing I owned.

The film from my childhood came rushing back. “I know exactly what to do with valuable things”, I thought to myself.

So, I sat down in the mall food court, just a few hundred yards from the storefront I had just left, somehow being trusted with the manufactured equivalent of a baby bird. I pulled my left shoe from my foot—a stripy Vans blucher which was trendy among skaters at the time; a group to which I did not belong but fancied myself a spiritual member of nonetheless. Then the sock. Visitors to the mall at neighboring tables stared derisively, but held their tongues politely. Though in hindsight, it would have been better had they not.

I pulled my brand-new spectacles from their hard plastic and faux leather shell, and slipped them into my sock. Hollywood wouldn't lie to me. Slipped the sock over my foot. Uncomfortable, but these are too valuable to put anywhere else. Slid my foot into the shoe. Now we're getting somewhere. Stood up and…

Crunch.

Yeah, so anyway. I learned three lessons that day:

1. Maybe the lesson of that movie wasn't about where to keep valuable things, so much as, I don't know—family? Forgiveness, maybe? Something banal, I'm sure.
2. You should not try to keep your glasses in your socks—at least not while you're wearing them.
3. I had a long road of stupid choices ahead of me.

Okay, 3 out of 5 things in that story were exaggerations for comedic effect. Can you guess which ones? It doesn't matter. What does matter is that I really did walk out of that store having purchased more than a pair of glasses. I also purchased a lifelong anxiety about the current location and condition of my glasses. As I got older and accumulated more glasses, in spite of the downward trend in their price, that anxiety logarithmically mounted with each new pair.

This is a problem I had to solve, and my first reliable 3D printer entered the scene right about the same time my 9th pair of glasses joined the ever-increasingly nerve-wracking pile of glasses growing at the back of my desk, steadily expanding clutter's gravitational pull.

Here's what makes this Sunglasses Rack special:

So, I opened up Fusion360 and got to work. Here's what makes this Sunglasses Rack special:

• Modularity - The actual holder for each pair of glasses slides onto a mounting plate, 3 at a time. You can stack as many on top of one another as you need and they'll look good
• Efficient Magnet Use - Instead of magnets in each holder, the magnets are inserted into the mounting plate, so just two magnets for every 3 holders, instead of more like 6.
• Glasses Stay Secure - Rather than relying on balancing glasses precariously on their nose piece, the holders are pockets that make it easy to pop the glasses in or pull them out without accidentally knocking others off.
• Attractive minimalist design - a simple pocket shape that looks nice, holds most glasses of various shapes and sizes, and totally isn't a result of having not known how to get it curvier at the time.

What you'll need:

• 3D printer (duh—we're bringing “duh” back; tell everyone)
• Filament, PLA is recommended
• 60x10x3mm magnets - I used these from Amazon.

Instructions:

• For one unit, print all the parts on the plate. 
• For more than one unit stacked on top of one another, print one of the first plate, and then as many of the second plate as you need.
• Insert some magnets into the slide plate(s). *Use a little superglue if they don't want to stay in there.
• Place the slide plate on a magnetic surface, and slide the holders onto the slide plate from the top. Here, I made you a video:

*Use a little glue if you need to:

The slide plate was originally designed to accept the magnets in a pressure fit, and it worked for about 7/10 of the magnets that I bough. But it turned out that the variation in dimensional accuracy for the magnets is larger than the printer’s. So if the magnets don’t hold themselves in very well, you might need to use a little super glue.

A note on Super Glue: Typical super glue doesn't hold as well to PETG because it's slightly less porous and slightly more oily than PLA. I'd recommend using PLA, or do a little research on how to help super glue stick to PETG. This isn’t some big industrial task, so it might not matter too much, but—the more you know, the more you know.