GBS Music Library 3D Printed End Stopper Solution

I was hired by my high school to design a solution for the Glenbrook South music library. Recently the school purchased new music storage shelves that had a major design flaw. The shelves use a vanilla folder to store the music inside and attach onto the shelf with a hook on either side. The music library has thousands of sheets of music causing it to overflow and the vanilla folders would slide off the shelve. This is due to the bars not having anything on the end to stop it from falling off. I came up with a solution by 3D printing and designing custom end caps.

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The L bar was not in the traditional 90 degree angle. It had a curved geometry making it impossible to create an exact pressure fit with out taking a picture. I imported that image into Fusion 360 and traced it using the spline tool. After a few test fits my desired tolerance was .08 mm to create the pressured fit.

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The next step was to 3D print 864 end stoppers. Each print job consisted of 32 end stoppers taking 3 hours and 42 minutes. My printer bed was warped so it could not handle doing more than 32 at a time.

The 3D printed parts worked vary well preventing the music folders from falling off the L bar. I learned a few new lessons from this project. This was the first time I was hired to use my skills to solve a problem. I learned the importance of time between being hired and showing a working product. After creating the product it is vital to ensure that it is a working solution to the problem. The first design was to weak and over time the pressure fit would cause the plastic to expand thus the end stoppers would pop off the shelf. I had to create a new iteration to account for the material properties of plastic.

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