Hey all! I got my handy around a year ago and got into scripts and this site at the same time (shout out to all the lovely people who create scripts, I love you <3). Last week I thought to myself “why not try to create my own sleeve.” If I managed that then I could have countless possibilities when it came to textures and feelings of sleeves. So I did just that. I hoped right into this project with minimal research so I have no clue if this has been done before but I wanted to give it a try. I have been in the 3d printing and other DIY projects scene and thought it would be an easy project, let me tell you boy was I wrong. So I hopped into Fusion 360 and began to model based off of measurements I took from one of the handy pre-existing sleeves. The beginning went easy, a simple recreating of the outside of the sleeve. But then came the part I hadn’t thought about, the inside. I had no previous experience modeling negative molds like that and couldn’t seem to figure it out in fusion 360. So I hopped into blender, randomly did some things, and ended up with my final result!
Here it is in all of its glory a simple sleeve based on the dimensions of the touch sleeve. The outside is a little rough and possibly too thick. With obvious seam lines and the inside texture being questionable it’s a rough draft at best.
The mold itself is a simple 3 piece mold consisting of two sides and a bottom with the attached negative mold to create the inside texture.
In the end I haven’t tested it yet as the silicon I have is left over from another project I did and is way too hard for a sleeve. Hopefully after doing a little more research into silicon I can find one that would work great for this application.
This whole project probably took about 10hrs of me fiddling around in fusion 360 and blender (to which I’m very new at) and the results are just ok. But with some tweaks I hope to improve on the finished quality and my modeling skills to create much better sleeves. Also as the framework is already there this should take much less time then the whole project. If this has been done before I would love to hear about it. And any tips and tricks for a DIY project like this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all!
PS. sorry for the kind of bad images, for some reason the light in my area and the silicon being clear-ish did not work so well together. Also yes I know there are already countless sleeves out there you can use, I just wanted to try my hand at creating my own.