Silica gel dry box for filament crates
Flat enough to fit under the spools — and without a latch, for good reason.
- Material
- PLA
- Layer height
- 0,2 mm
- Print time
- 2,4–3 h
Filament wants to sit dry. If you store it in crates with a spool holder, there's barely any room underneath — and dry boxes are almost all too tall.
So: a flat one. 125 × 125 × 15 mm, with a sliding lid. Two of them fit in the base frame of the spool holder, each holding around 78 g of rechargeable silica gel. They go in and out with a little play, no tools.
Why the lid doesn't latch
This is the decision people ask about most, and it was deliberate.
A latch holds the lid shut — right up until the day it jams while you're changing the gel. Then you're sitting there with a box full of silica and can't get it open. The lid doesn't need to seal here anyway: the box is inside a closed crate already, and that's the whole point.
Less mechanism, less to go wrong.
What came after publishing
Feedback showed the lid had too much play. The offset has been adjusted since and test-printed twice — the lid now runs tighter in its guide without binding.
Users also reported that the box works in larger crates with other spool holders. I haven't tested that myself; it's here because it came from there and not from me.
Printing
- 0.2 mm layer height, 2 walls, 15 % infill
- silica gel with a grain larger than 1.5 mm, otherwise it trickles through
- I use rechargeable granulate at 2–3 mm