A Super Easy Way to 3D Print Custom-Fit Trays for Your Tools

Tool organization is one of those oft-overlooked, but very important, parts of being a maker. That just becomes more important as your collection of tools grows. If you’ve jumped on the Gridfinity bandwagon and want some of those nifty custom-fit trays for your tools, Making Stuff has a great video that will walk you through a super easy way to design them.

Gridfinity is Zack Freedman’s open design for storage trays that fit into a handy and versatile grid base. It is very popular with makers and has seen widespread adoption, which means there are printable Gridfinity trays for just about every generic application you can think of. The tricky part comes when you want to accommodate your own specific tools in specific arrangements.

In the past, designing custom-fit trays would require CAD work or potentially 3D-scanning. But Making Stuff’s video demonstrates a much simpler and quicker solution: a free online tool called Tooltrace.

To use the Tooltrace, you simply capture an overhead photo of your tools sitting on a sheet of paper. Upload that to the web app and it will figure out the relative size of the tools using standard paper sizes as a reference. It then scans the outline of each tool’s shape.

With that, you have your tool outlines in just a minute or two. The web app then lets you place those on a Gridfinity template. Position them however you like and when you’re satisfied, Tooltrace will spit out a 3D-printable STL file. You can even add features like finger notches to make it easier to grab tools from the tray.

This seems incredibly useful and you can bet I’ll be printing some for my own shop very soon. This process is so much easier and faster than traditional methods, so it is a no-brainer.

And a quick tip: to avoid parallax issues in your photos, take the picture from as far away as you can with a long focal length. If you’re using a smartphone, you’ll probably want to use the highest optical zoom you have available.