Drachenberg USB Drive: Dragon Mountain Design

Universal Serial Bus?  More like, Ultimate Sword Blade!

The Drachenberg USB Drive is comically-huge and fully-awesome.  It started out as an experiment for a series of USB drive re-skins I’m planning to work on, and the end result is due to the nature of the flash drive I chose (which for some reason I thought would be significantly smaller than it is).  I’ll be going back to the drawing board with a more low-profile USB drive at an undetermined point in the future, but all in all, I had a great time working on this.

And thanks to Onshape’s new *.dxf importing features, I even got the crest on the hilt!

Parts List:

• 16GB USB Flash Drive – SanDisk SDCZ36-016G I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the other storage sizes have more or less the same physical footprint (we all know what happens when we assume things though).

That’s it.

Helpful Tools:

• 3D Printer (or printing service)

• Dremel (rotary or MultiMax)

Surgery Time

Extend the USB connector, take your Dremel and cut the very back end off (CUT #1). CAREFULLY cut along the side of the drive, making sure to only go as deep as the plastic housing, and remove the drive from said plastic housing (CUT #2).

Print out the Housings

Files can be found on Thingiverse and YouMagine. Also, if you’re in the mood for modifying the design to your fancy, the files have been made public on Onshape. Search for ‘DrachenbergUSBDrive.’

11/13/2015 UPDATE:  Files can now also be located at Cults3D!  If you’ve been enjoying this and other projects, consider throwing a donation my way to help drive future projects.  No pressure though.

5/26/2016 UPDATE:  Excited to have these files also on MyMiniFactory!  This was one of my favorite quick projects, so have fun with it!

Assemble

The USB drive fits snugly within the Blade Base, which snaps securely into the Hilt. The Blade End slips over the exposed connector when not in use.

And you’re finished.  Have a stab at loading data from your PC.  I’m using mine to store design files.