I love my Craftsman ball-end T-handle allen wrench set. But my pet peeve is that they don’t come with a caddy, and nobody makes generic caddies without the wrenches included, and if they did, they likely wouldn’t have the right size holes to match my set.
So, when I bought my drill press I made a caddy as a first project out of some scrap plywood.
It was pretty effective, but it was too narrow and the wrenches are very top-heavy so it toppled over a lot.
Well, with my X-Carve I decided to update the design making it a little wider and here’s the result.
I will likely change this design even more, as the middle holes didn’t have nearly enough support material and cracked and blew out and needed to be glued. Also, the holes for the wrenches themselves needed to be about .2mm larger than the wrench to allow some tolerance and make it a bit easier to slide them in and out. As do the holes for the threaded rods.
Also of note: the larger holes are set up as outlines, while the smaller holes are pockets. At first I cut everything as pockets and it took 2 hours to cut one piece. The new strategy cut the time in half, but left me with a bunch of awkward tabs to cut out and flatten. Easel really needs the option to adjust where and how many tabs it uses. Some of the triangles had 4 tabs on them, the tabs themselves were of varying widths, and it put them sometimes in corners or around the arc of a circle where removing and shaping the wood attractively would be next to impossible. I feel like this may have contributed to the tearout problems I had in the middle holes.
All in all it was a great project and I’m very happy that the machine is tuned well and humming along wonderfully after some bumps getting started. It’s a fun journey learning about the limits of the machine and the materials, getting better each time, and most of all making real things from computer designs.
