Your 3D Printer Has a Tool Drawer Problem

If you own a 3D printer, you already own a small mountain of accessories: spare nozzles in three sizes, the hex keys that came in the box, flush cutters, a scraper, tweezers, a nozzle wrench, a coil of PTFE tubing, and a bag of bed springs you swear you will need someday. Most of it lives in a tangled drawer or the printer's original box. Setting up Gridfinity for your 3D printer toolkit fixes that by giving every tool a labeled, snap-in home right next to the machine.

The catch has always been design time. Gridfinity bins are modular, but a pile of oddly shaped printer tools does not drop neatly into generic boxes. This guide shows you how to build trays shaped to your actual gear, and how to skip the CAD work entirely by generating them from a single photo.

Why a 3D Printer Toolkit Is Perfect for Gridfinity

Gridfinity is an open-source organization system created by Zack Freedman, built on a simple 42 mm × 42 mm grid. Bins snap into a baseplate so nothing slides around, and you can rearrange the layout any time your kit changes. That modularity is exactly what a 3D printing workspace needs, because the tool collection grows every time you tackle a new mod or upgrade.

A printer toolkit is an ideal candidate for custom Gridfinity trays for three reasons:

The tools are irregular. Pliers, scrapers, and nozzle wrenches do not stack like cubes. Pockets shaped to each tool keep them from rattling and make a missing tool obvious at a glance.
The small parts are easy to lose. Nozzles, springs, and silicone socks vanish into drawers. Dedicated compartments with labels keep sizes separated.
You already print. Unlike most people shopping for an organizer, you own the machine that makes it. The only real cost is filament and design time, and this guide removes the design time.

What to Put in Your 3D Printer Tool Trays

Before you design anything, lay out everything you want to store. A typical 3D printing kit breaks into three groups, and it helps to plan a tray or a baseplate zone for each.

Everyday tools you reach for during and after every print:

Flush cutters and needle-nose pliers
Tweezers for grabbing stray strings and purge blobs
A bed scraper or spatula and a deburring tool
The hex and Allen key set that shipped with the printer
A nozzle wrench or socket and a small brass brush
Calipers, which deserve their own protected slot

Nozzles and hotend parts, sorted by size and material:

Brass nozzles in 0.4, 0.6, and 0.8 mm
Hardened or specialty nozzles, kept separate from brass
Silicone socks, spare heat breaks, and thermistors

Spare parts and consumables you do not touch often but never want to hunt for:

Spare PTFE or Bowden tube and a tube cutter
Bed springs, leveling knobs, and a spare part-cooling fan
Zip ties, a spare belt, and a tube of thermal paste
Glue stick or adhesion sheets for bed prep

How to Make Custom 3D Printer Tool Trays From a Photo

You have two routes: model each pocket by hand in CAD, or photograph your tools and let software generate the tray. Here is the fast path.

Lay your tools on a flat, contrasting surface. A dark cutting mat under metal tools, or a light sheet of paper under dark ones, gives the cleanest outlines. Leave a little space between items so their edges stay distinct.
Shoot straight down in even light. Hold your phone parallel to the surface and avoid harsh shadows. Diffuse daylight from a window beats a single hard lamp.
Generate the tray. Upload the photo and let the tool detect each item and build a pocket shaped to fit, snapped to the Gridfinity grid.
Download and print. Export the print-ready file, slice it, and print. Drop the finished tray onto your baseplate.

If you want to dial in your photos before you start, our guide to file formats and lighting for Gridfinity trays walks through the details.

Print Settings That Hold Up in a Workshop

Tool trays take abuse, so a few settings matter more than usual:

Material: PLA is fine for a drawer. If the tray sits on top of a heated enclosure or in a hot garage, PETG resists warping better.
Walls and infill: Three perimeters and 15 to 20 percent infill give bins that survive being dropped without wasting filament.
Tolerances: If bins fit too tightly on the baseplate, loosen your slicer's horizontal expansion a touch.

For a deeper dive, see our Gridfinity print settings guide.

Why GridPilot Makes This Easy

GridPilot turns a single phone photo into a print-ready Gridfinity tray. Instead of measuring each nozzle and modeling pockets in CAD, you photograph your tools and the AI detects their outlines, builds a fitted pocket for each one, and snaps the whole layout to the standard 42 mm grid. You get a 3MF file ready to slice in minutes, sized to drop straight onto any Gridfinity baseplate.

That speed matters most for a kit like this, where the items are irregular and you would otherwise spend an evening in CAD just to organize one drawer.

Start With Your Messiest Drawer

You do not have to organize the whole workshop at once. Pull out the drawer where your printer tools live, lay them on a contrasting surface, and take one photo. A few minutes later you can have a tray shaped to your exact kit, snapped to the Gridfinity grid, and ready to print on the machine sitting right there.

Try GridPilot free and turn your tool pile into a custom tray →

Gridfinity for Your 3D Printer Toolkit: Custom Trays for Nozzles, Tools, and Spare Parts (From a Photo)