Gridfinity for Milwaukee Packout: Custom Drawer Inserts From a Single Photo
The Packout Drawer Is Perfect — Until You Open It
Milwaukee Packout drawers solve the toughest part of a mobile job site: keeping stacks of tool boxes you can actually grab, roll, and lock. The drawers themselves are stiff, deep, and modular. The inside of those drawers is where it falls apart. The stock foam is generic, the OEM dividers cost more than the drawer did, and within a week of real use your sockets, bits, and pliers are sliding into one corner every time you push a hand truck over a curb.
Gridfinity is the obvious fix. The 42 mm modular grid is now the de facto standard for 3D-printed shop organization, and the Packout drawer footprint maps onto a clean 7 × 9 baseplate that drops in without screws or glue. The hard part has always been the next step: modeling a custom bin for your exact wrenches, in your exact layout, without spending an evening in CAD. This guide walks through how to get from a phone photo of your tools to a printable Packout-fitted Gridfinity drawer in under five minutes.
Why Gridfinity and Packout Are Made for Each Other
A 3-drawer Packout (48-22-8443) and a 4-drawer Packout (48-22-8444) share nearly identical interior drawer dimensions. Both accept a 7 × 9 Gridfinity baseplate — that's 63 grid cells of 42 × 42 mm each, with a small dead-space border around the edge. The slim/low-profile drawers (48-22-8447) use the same footprint with shallower bins. Once that baseplate is locked in, every bin you print becomes interchangeable across drawers, across boxes, and across the rest of your workshop bench if you've already gone Gridfinity-native.
The catch: a baseplate full of empty 1×1 bins is not actually an organizer. It's an egg crate. What makes a Packout drawer feel custom is when each bin matches a specific tool — a ratchet cradle, a notched socket rail, a contoured pliers slot — sized to your inventory, not a generic kit.
The Old Way: Calipers, CAD, and Regret
Building those custom bins by hand is a real time sink:
- Measure each tool with calipers (length, width, max thickness)
- Decide how many grid cells each bin should occupy
- Open Fusion 360, OpenSCAD, or a Gridfinity parametric generator
- Model the negative pocket for each tool
- Lay them out on the baseplate without overlap
- Re-export, re-slice, re-print when something doesn't fit
For a single drawer of 25–40 tools that's easily a full evening. Multiply by three or four drawers and most people just give up and live with the generic foam.
The Photo-First Approach
The trick is to invert the workflow. Instead of measuring tools and modeling pockets, you photograph your tools as they already lie in the drawer and let computer vision do the geometry. GridPilot reads a single overhead photo, detects each tool outline, snaps the layout to the nearest Gridfinity cell boundaries, and emits a print-ready 3MF you can drop straight into your slicer.
Here's what that looks like end to end for a Packout drawer:
Step 1: Lay Out the Drawer the Way You Actually Want It
Pull the drawer out, empty it, and arrange your tools the way you'd want to grab them — most-used in the front row, related tools grouped (all your hex drivers together, ratchet next to its sockets), longer tools horizontal across the back. Don't worry about exact spacing yet; the AI will snap things to grid.
Step 2: Take One Overhead Photo
Hold your phone directly above the drawer, roughly 18–24 inches up, so the whole drawer fills the frame with maybe an inch of border. Soft daylight from a window beats overhead shop lighting — you want minimal hard shadows around each tool. The Packout's flat black interior is actually ideal here because it gives the AI a clean, high-contrast background.
Step 3: Upload to GridPilot and Pick the Packout Baseplate
Drop the photo into the project page. Select the 7 × 9 baseplate preset for Packout drawers (or 7 × 9 with the slim-drawer height for the low-profile boxes). GridPilot detects each tool, drops a contoured pocket around it, and snaps the bin walls to grid lines. You'll see a live preview overlaid on your photo so you can verify the layout before exporting.
Step 4: Adjust, Then Export 3MF
Drag bins to merge two singles into a 1×2, raise the wall height on the deep-drawer profile, or add a finger-pull cutout to a frequently grabbed bin. Hit export. You get a single 3MF containing the baseplate and every fitted bin, already arranged on the build plate.
Print Settings That Survive a Real Job Site
Packout drawers get slammed, dropped, and frozen in truck beds. Generic Gridfinity print profiles are tuned for living-room shelves and they don't hold up. For drawer inserts that ride in a truck:
- Material: PETG. Tougher than PLA in heat (a closed truck cab in summer is no joke) and it doesn't turn brittle the way PLA does after a winter.
- Layer height: 0.24 mm. The bins don't need fine detail and you want to be done printing the same day.
- Walls: 3 perimeters. The wall thickness is what makes a bin survive a dropped wrench, not infill.
- Infill: 15% gyroid. Anything more is wasted filament for an organizer.
- Top/bottom: 4 layers each. Keeps the bin floor stiff under a heavy socket set.
A full Packout-sized baseplate is about 294 × 378 mm, which exceeds most 256 mm build plates. Print it in 2–4 sections and snap them together — the Gridfinity baseplate is designed to tile, so the seams disappear inside the drawer.
What This Actually Saves You
The math on a 4-drawer Packout (48-22-8444) loaded out for a mobile electrician:
- Generic Milwaukee foam set: $40–$80 per drawer, doesn't fit your specific tools
- CAD-modeled custom inserts: 6–10 hours per drawer, plus reprints
- Photo-to-3MF workflow: one photo, 5 minutes, prints overnight
If you're running multiple Packout boxes across a crew, the time difference is the whole story. A foreman who can hand a tech a clean photo of a drawer in the morning and get fitted inserts off the printer that night is operating in a different gear than one who's still nudging vertices in Fusion.
Why GridPilot Fits This Job
Most Gridfinity tools start from CAD primitives and ask you to describe your tools to the software. GridPilot inverts that: you show it the tools, in the orientation you actually want them, and it produces the geometry. For Packout users specifically, that matters because the value of a Packout system is field deployability — you don't want to be hand-modeling 200 bin pockets after work. A photo, a baseplate preset, a 3MF, done. Start a Packout project here.
Bottom Line
Gridfinity is the right system for Packout drawers and has been for two years. The reason most users still have generic foam inside is that custom-modeling each bin was never worth the evening it took. Photo-to-3MF tooling removes that cost. If you have a Packout drawer, a phone, and a printer, you have everything you need to be fully fitted by the end of the week.