Pen Holder

I like to collect all-metal pens. I have a small collection that I would like to display on my desk rather than have them hiding in a drawer. I figured I could print a nice one but I was not able to find a design that I liked. A few days ago, I came across a design by Karas Customs on Kickstarter. I loved the look of it, but I couldn't justify the $75 price tag just to hold my pens. So I decided to draw up something similar in CAD and print it.

design in 123D Design

Drawing the holder was pretty easy. It is just a cube with 9 holes in it. But I wanted to add a custom touch, my company logo embossed on one of the sides. With my limited CAD experience, that turned out to be a bit more difficult than I expected. I am sure there are easier ways to do this, but here's how I did it.

sketching over stl object

First I opened a .png of the logo in Cura and created an .stl object just as I described in this post. Then I opened the new .stl file in 123D Design. The file had way too many faces and I couldn't manipulate the object to extrude it. So I lowered the object below the plane and manually traced a new sketch on top of it. Then I deleted the object and just saved the new sketch. Next I opened the pen holder file in 123D and inserted the new sketch.

sketch of logo with holder

Finally, I just moved the sketch into position, scaled it to fit, and extruded it into the pen holder. Then I exported the file as an .stl so I could open it in Cura and print. It sounds easy enough but it took me several tries to get the workflow correct. Again, there is probably a more efficient way to do this, but this worked for me. Like the original, I added some recesses in the bottom for rubber feet.

final design in Cura

I printed it out at the normal quality defaults. After 19+ hours, I had a really nice holder for my pen collection. It's  not as sexy as the original but I really like it and the logo adds a nice personal touch.