[DIY] Filament Rack for Vertical Shelf Rails - 3D Print

Shelves on vertical track rails are great to free up space in a room and cut down on clutter. They can be used to store filament by stacking boxes / spools but that isn't as convenient and clean looking as a horizontal spool rack.

So I designed these holders that fit inside standard shelf brackets and hold 2 rods spaced just right to hold 1kg spools, refill boxes and larger filament boxes from various suppliers.

The Fusion 360 CAD model (very messy), STEP and 3MF files are all on Github

Happy decluttering to all !

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 How It Works

The holders (purple items in pic) hold standard closet rods and are shaped to simply slide into the shelf brackets:

A couple of screws then holds them in place.

Printing 

Settings

• 0.2mm layer height, 0.4mm nozzle
• 4 walls, 1mm thick top & bottom
• 25% adaptive cubic infil
• no support, 6 parts per plate

There are 3 models to pick from, depending on the brand of 7" bracket used (details in next section). The Lowes version takes 182 grams of filament for a quantity of 6, with a print time of about 3.5 hours on a P1S.

 Shelf Hardware

The holders are compatible with the standard dual-slotted vertical rail shelf rack systems out there from Everbilt, Project Source Tracksmart , Rubbermaid Fast Track, Closetmaid ShelfTrack and many others.

They are typically used in closets.

 

The 3D printed rod holders are specifically designed for the short 7" brackets that typically support 8" to 10" large shelves. Examples from: Lowes and Amazon Stone Harbor or Knape & Vogt

Unfortunately, although they're all sold as 7" bracket and look the same, each brand has slight variations in size, width, hole locations. So, although I went with the Lowes bracket, I also created models for Stone Harbor and Knape & Vogt. Hopefully this will help people have more sourcing options.

Lowes' dimensions:

Stone Harbor:

Knape & Vogt:

All 3 models printed:

Each bracket is held in place with a couple of #8 x 3/8" (4mm x 10mm) Pan Head white screw 

If your bracket type is none of those, just open the Fusion CAD model and modify the parameters in the sketches.

The closet rods are 0.75" (~19mm) in diameter, again from track suppliers like Everbilt and company.

The holes for the rods in the CAD model are 20.1mm in diameter (i.e. 1/91st of an eagle wing span), so anything smaller than that will fit. 

 

 

Installation 

Installation is straight forward: first insert the metal bracket onto the track, then insert the holder into the bracket, install the screw in the back closest to the wall first, and finish with the 2nd screw.

 

The most difficult and time consuming task is to install the tracks onto the wall, all properly aligned vertically and spaced equally.

I first identified the position of the studs with a stud finder and set the first track. Not wanting to install the ugly big horizontal flat hanger bar that eack track is supposed to hang from, each of my tracks independently hangs on the wall with screws. They were all aligned horizontally with a level on top of a shelf board.

 

And voila, the pig sty before:

And after:

Yes, it is even messier now... 😅