Scraper Blade Dispenser

Scraper Blade Dispenser

A small dispenser for the replacement blades of the Scalper with Blade bed scraper. It holds a stack of 10 blades and hands them out one at a time. An optional flush lid snaps shut to keep the stack clean and stop blades from falling out of the top.

How to use it

• Lift the lid off with a fingernail in one of the side notches. Drop the blades into the top, bevel side up, then press the lid back in until it clicks.
• Push the bottom blade forward with your thumb through the window in the floor. It slides out through the mouth at the front.
• The mouth is only one blade thick plus a small gap, so only one blade comes out at a time.
• The pushed-out blade sticks out of the front, so you can slide the scraper straight onto it.
• The window on the front shows how many blades are left.

Parts

• Dispenser: the blade tower with the exit mouth, thumb window, view window and a recess at the top for the lid.
  • The mouth is cut straight through the full width of the cavity, so nothing narrows the blade's path out.
  • The inside edge of the lip above the mouth is rounded upward, which gives the blades a lead-in.
  • The inside corners are rounded for strength, and the rounding stays clear of the blades' chamfered corners.
• Lid (optional): a flat plate with rounded corners that drops into the recess, flush with the top.
  • Four small round bumps along each of the front and back edges snap into matching dimples in the recess wall.
  • There's a fingernail notch on each side for opening it.

Printing

• Print the dispenser upright, as modelled. It needs no supports.
• Turn off Lid assembled to lay the lid flat beside the dispenser for printing.
• The ceiling of the exit mouth prints as a bridge about 42 mm wide, so check your bridging settings.
• The dispenser takes about 8.5 g of filament and just under an hour to print with typical settings.

Customize it

• Blade: width, depth, thickness and corner chamfer. Set these to match the scraper's blade settings.
• Dispenser: capacity from 3 to 30 blades (the height grows with it), clearance around the stack, exit gap, lip rounding, wall and floor thickness, headroom above a full stack, outside and inside corner rounding, and the view window.
• Thumb window: width and length.
• Lid: on or off, plate thickness, fit clearance, ledge width, the nail notches, and the snap detents (on or off, size, how far they stick out, how many per edge and their spacing).

Some settings have limits so the dispenser keeps working:

• The exit gap can't get tall enough to let two blades out at once.
• The thumb window can't run so far forward that a blade drops through.
• The inside corners can't be rounded so much that they touch the blades.
• The lip rounding always leaves enough of the front wall.
• The lid recess and the detent dimples always leave enough wall behind them.
• The detent bumps always stick out past the fit clearance, so they always snap.
• The nail notches can't reach down into a full stack.

Goes with: Scalper with Blade, the bed scraper these blades fit.