Tight and Tidy Resistor Storage Box (parametric)

Like every other newb, I bought one of those “1500 assorted resistor packs” online when I started my e-tinkering journey. Since then, I've spent months digging through the collection, trying to find the value I need while those little ziplock bags keep slipping and sliding and skittering across my desk. And let's not talk about the mess you have to clean up after you find it, right? There's gotta be a better way. 

So I checked out a bunch of options that other folks find useful, but none of them really hit my Goldilocks zone. I don't want to spend a couple of days printing it; I don't want to devote 6 sq feet of precious desk-space to hold it, and I don't want to have to take the resistors out of those handy little bags or bust them all off their tape strips. The baggies work; they're just not easy to work with the way they are shipped . 

So my solution celebrated the baggie goodness, but makes them way easier to manage, by putting them in a box that's more like a file drawer. And as a bonus, this box is 25% smaller than the original, so I've actually regained space on my desk.

Resizing

I like the compact size of the version I've included here: it holds the entire 1500 unit collection and doesn't take up much space, but, hey, you aren't me. You might have completely different thoughts and concerns. If so, then you might even want to tweek things to suit your life instead of mine, so I've included the OpenSCAD file. You'll find all the important parameters declared at the top. Customize it any way you like.

A Word About Bulkiness

If you just jam the baggies into the box, they'll fit, but you'll find them a bit tight. Not a problem if space is at a premium for you, but they'll probably pull a couple of neighbor bags out with them when you find the one you want. This is because, with all the bags oriented the same way, the thickness of all the resistors overlap each other and make things unnecessarily cramped.

Fortunately, a couple of minutes work up front can change all that: just alternate the bags, right side up and upside down. This way, the bulky resistors will be at two different heights instead of just one, and everything will have room to breathe. 

Note: If your bags are labeled at both top and bottom, you can just flip every other bag when you're loading them, but in my case, only the upper tapes are marked, so I flipped the resistors inside half of them, to keep the labels all at the top. In hindsight, however, I should have hand-labeled the bottom tapes instead. That way any baggie can get filed in either orientation and it won't make a difference. You should probably do it like that.

Index Cards

To make the collection easy to search quickly, I've also included some handy index cards, dividing the collection up into orders of magnitude: 0-99 ohms, 100-999, 1000-9999, and so on. If you can't be bothered to keep the box fully sorted, even just getting the bags into the right section will simplify your later searches. 

Printing

I made mine in PLA, with 0.3mm layers in a 0.4mm nozzle, with 3 perimeters, 10% infill, and no supports, and it works fine. (For reference, it took about 4 hours to print the box, the lid, and the 6 index cards on my MK3S+.)