Yellow 3D Printed Cat Container With Moving Lid!

With this container, it is going to be 3D printed, and, with this build, Tinkercad would make the process the easiest! Any design could be put on this, but for this one, it is going to be a cat face! As well as this, the lid of the container is going to be able to slide in and out of its place with rails so that it can be opened and closed.

3D Printer

Filament

Something to put inside!

With the base, you could make be fairly creative when it comes to what shape you want it to be. You could make it thick, thin, tall, short, rectangular, round, anything! With this container, though, it is going to be tall and rectangular, and you are going to use a hole a bit shorter and smaller than the outside to be the inside of the container.

With the face, I used pyramids for the ears, stretched out boxes for the whiskers, and round roofs with holes for the eyes and mouth. Before placing the attachments for the face, though, it is better to set them up how you want them separate from the base, and then moving them on once they are the way you want them to look. It is especially important to do anything involving holes away from the base because if you group the attachments to the base before grouping the holes and the attachments, then there will also be holes in your base, which no one wants!

When making the lid, you need to make sure the measurements of it connect to the measurements of your base. As you can see, it may take a couple of tries to get the exact lid size and shape you want, but what is important in order for the lid to stay in place is the rails shown in the final example (the yellow one). Without the rails, the lid will not stay properly in place. As well as this, similar to the attachments in the previous step, this is something important to do separately from the base, and you can attach it once you have gotten it the way it should look.

If you measured properly, then the lid should just fit nicely on top of the base, but if not, then you could always fix the size of the lid to the shape of the base as long as it does not mess anything up. When printing, you need to make sure that there is not only some space in the hole that the lid moves in and out of in the front, but also some space open above the container so that the lid does not get stuck in place.

When it comes to printing the container, it may be too tall for some printers to print it at the full size at once like shown in the previous step. In that case, you need to split up the container into two separate pieces like this. Although, if you are to print it like this, you also need to print out 4 little squares as shown in the photo so you are able to hot glue the squares to attach to the sides of the inside of the container so the pieces will stay together.

Once you have completed all of the following steps, you should have your finished product! Whether it looks just like the example at the start or you put your own twist on how exactly it looks, the lid should slide in and out of place well and hold still!