Household 3D Prints: Kitchen Knife Block

Kitchen Knife Block

    A few weeks ago I was washing some dishes in the kitchen and noticed the appalling state of the old wooden knife blocks, both were caked with dust and other debris, some seemed to have become ingrained into the finish, so I decided to 3D print a replacement that could actually hold all of the knives in a single block. The first step was looking at the full set to figure out what the basic sizes and styles were, came out as 2 cleavers, 5 regular ones, 2 pairing and 1 carving fork from a couple different sets. Most of them were fairly close in size for each type, so I took the length and width of the larges examples for each, then drew up a layout in Fusion 360.

Kitchen Knife Block in Fusion 360

     One issue that the old blocks had was it was difficult to access the handles for some of the knives due to the slots being tightly spaced, so I measured the handle widths and used double that dimension for the slot offset to fix this issue. Modelling the final form took about a day, then I loaded the model into my slicing program, ran the process with my standard settings and hit a snag. It was estimating over 1kg of PLA to print, and I didn't have any spools that big, so I decided to flip it on end and ditch the infill to see if that helped. It worked and got the weight down to 900g or so, so I turned it loose on the Mega Kossel with an almost full spool of PLA.

Finished Knife Block in use

    After almost 2 days of non-stop printing, it finished at 46 hours and an empty spool of PLA. I'd previously done a couple small prints with the reel, so I actually ended up doing the last 3 cm on the Ender 3 with another spool, then using my 3D pen to weld the 2 sections together. This thing is officially the single longest print I've ever done in the past 4 years, so I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out.