My bottle caps encased in CD cases

Some years ago, I started a bottle cap collection. This was sort of nostalgic for me, as I used to have an enormous collection when I was about 10 or 11 years old. Back then, my caps were stored in a big cardboard box, and they were mostly duplicates - back then I cared more about quantity over quality. Sadly, I got rid of my original collection a long time ago. I simply threw it out.

My new collection is a lot more methodical. I only keep one of each and make sure they don’t get scratched. For the longest time, they lived in these small plastic A4 paper holders, neatly organized inside a larger binder. But that made the collection annoying to show off. So I thought long and hard of what to do, especially now with my 3D-printer up and running.

The answer became CD jewel cases! It turns out that a bottle cap is exactly wide enough to fit inside one of these, once the CD and CD holder are removed. I can source these cases very cheaply, about 1 DKK per case, which is much cheaper than filament for my 3D-printer. On top of that, using the 3D-printer, I would never have been able to get such a transparent front cover (which is nice to prevent dust accumulation).

As you can see, I sorted my collection by color as indicated by the cardboard square on top. Sadly, this design was not sustainable as:

1. The cardboard would peel of, become dented or become dirty
2. It was difficult to source cardboard in the correct colors. Especially if I wanted dual color cases, pink & purple for example

I solved this by 3D-printing the side instead. I programmed a model in OpenSCAD, which was a long and tedious process. Thankfully, it made it easy to use. Inside the model there is a variable that I can customize:

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Label_texts = [
    ["Grøn", "1"],
    ["Blå", "1"],
    ["Gul", "1"],
    ["Hvid", "1"],
    ["Sort", "1"],
    ["Grå", "1"],
    ["Brun & Orange", "1"],
    ["Lilla / Pink", "1"],
    ["Rød", "2"]
];

which produces the result below:

These fit neatly in a CD jewel case, once the backing is removed (the part which holds the CD). When printing, I inserted a pause, allowing me to switch to black filament for the actual label part. The number on the right is for when I have multiple cases for the same color.

I have released the model publically on Printables.