To kick-start the conversation, let me share a small project I created with the parametric version of Shapr3D – partly to test its functionality, partly because I needed it 
I’d really love to hear similar stories from you!
Problem to solve
Part of the joy of using vinyl records is to browse them when you are thinking about what to put on. While most records have a label printed on their sides, it’s usually in a very small typeface and trying to read them is way less fun than flipping through your LPs and examining the artwork on each. A good kind of vinyl stand allows you to do that.
There are many products out there there that solve that problem and we already own one such rack:
But our current rack is already full and off-the-shelf products are quite overpriced once you include tax and shipping to Hungary (where I live) – and it seemed like a simple enough and fun project to design and take our history-based parametric modeling capabilities out for a test ride.
My own rack design
My design is a copy of the original concept, with four parts (2x rack, 2x plexiglass endpiece), interlocked with a simple tongue-and-groove joint, the plexiglass endpieces hold the two wooden racks together. The advantage of that is that it’s easily disassembled without the need for glue, nails, screws or anything similar.
Design experience with HBPM
Even though the alpha is in quite early stages, it already worked quite well for this task:
- It took about 1-2 hours to come up with a fairly extensible and configurable model. Later adjustments were trivial, taking minutes.
- Driving the geometries from a few base sketches worked great: I could make adjustments a lot quicker than what it’d have taken with direct modeling. I could change a few driving dimensions and have the constraint solver calculate the rest through the constraints I set up and have the changes propagate through the entire design
- The main adjustments I used this for:
- change the sides of the rack taller to support the weight of the ~50 LPs when full
- play around with the length of the rack
- adapt the size & thickness of the plexiglass to react to manufacturability issues
An unexpected, but nice side-effect was that I could also come up with a slightly better DXF export flow than what’s possible in the production version: just making a copy & projecting it to a plane dedicated for the export. The copy would get updated together with the original model and I could dedicate that group for the export itself where I could do any post processing, plane alignment and everything else, without messing up the original design.
Things I struggled with:
- projecting into an existing sketch was not possible (we fixed it since then)
- drawings got broken as I updated the objects (also fixed)
- I missed the Pattern tool real bad, I could’ve used it for the ridges in the middle of the rack (it’s coming soon though)
- projecting flat bodies to coplanar planes can create overlapping sketch lines (one for each sides of the edge faces) which are then get included in the DXF exports, causing problems during manufacturing
- real-time updates upon sketch changes were really useful, but when I was changing a foundational sketch without rolling back, the interaction could be annoyingly sluggish – this UX needs to be improved, offering auto-rollback or some other way to deal with the situation when real-time updates are too costly (strangely enough, performance around this was similar on my M1 Macbook Air and my beefy Windows workstation, so there’s probably some room for optimization here as well)
Manufacturing
I went to a nearby makerspace to manufacture my design. I used laser cutting to cut the endpieces from an acrylic plate and CNC-milling the cut the rack from a plywood board.
In action
After some small adjustment with sandpaper to make up for the imprecision of the plexiglass thickness, the parts fit together well and the product looked quite similar to how the design previews showed it would. After bringing it home, it stood up to the weight tests as well, accommodating the ~50 LPs I designed it for.
Build your own
If you want to build your own version of exactly the same design, the drawings are available here. and the 3D model on GrabCAD. The parametric Shapr3D model is available here:
Vinyl holder (DH) 5.450 published.shapr (586.0 KB)
Do you have questions or comments about the (parametric) design process? Have something similar to share? I’d be happy to hear more about them.
), but I’ll also roll back when I need to change operation settings.