Model Overview & Print Notes

Summary

A set of Gridfinity-compatible kitchen and cutlery drawer bins with full-height handle cutouts in the side walls, so you can lift contents out without tipping the bin. Generated parametrically with count-spatula so if none of these sizes fit your drawer, the free generator can make one that does.

Print bins bigger than your bed. The handle cutouts are aligned to the Gridfinity 42 mm grid: the cutout floor reaches 1 mm past its internal grid line, so you can cut the model on a grid line in your slicer and print an oversized bin in clean sections. The chopping-board bin (251.5 mm long) prints on my 3D printer which has a 220 mm bed this way.

The bins

  • Chopping-board bin (4×6, 8U) holds a small chopping board upright (220 × 160 mm pocket, 35 mm corner radius). Footprint 167.5 × 251.5 mm; split on a grid line for smaller beds.
  • Cutlery bin, 3 columns (2×4, 8U) is an everyday cutlery-drawer bin: one pocket split into three equal columns by straight dividers. The handle cutout runs through the dividers. Footprint 83.5 × 167.5 mm.
  • Wave cutlery bin, 3 columns (2×4, 8U) is the same bin as above, but with S-curve wave dividers (6 mm amplitude). Adjacent channels alternate orientation so tapered cutlery nests head-to-tail.
  • Kitchen bin (2×4, 8U) is the plain, undivided bin with handle cutouts; the simplest one to try first and fill out any gaps left in your drawer.

All bins sit on a standard Gridfinity base (footprint N×42 mm − 0.5 mm) and have 56 mm (8-unit) interior walls.

Knife blade block

A different way to store kitchen knives: instead of a knife-block-in-a-drawer that holds knives by
the handle (wasting most of a drawer's depth on blade you can't use for anything else), this holds
them by the blade. Knives lie flat, edge-down, alternating head-to-toe so each one's handle lands
at the opposite end from its neighbour's, which lets them sit closer together than their
handles alone would allow. Every blade passes through the same small block, each in its own
self-centring tapered slot that grips spines from 2–3 mm without rattling and keeps the cutting edge floating clear of the plastic.

The block is the only part you need. It drops into a standard Gridfinity baseplate like any
other bin, and it does all the holding on its own: each slot grips its blade along the full length of
the block, so the knife is carried by the blade alone. The handle hangs clear at one end, and the run
of blade projecting from the other end counterbalances it. Nothing sits under the handles.

Sized by default for seven similarly-lengthed kitchen knives (handles up to 26 mm wide, 2–3 mm
spines) on a 3×2 Gridfinity footprint (125.5 × 83.5 mm) — it prints flat in one piece, no splitting
needed. If your knives differ, the generator's --knife-count, --handle-width-mm, and
--handle-gap-mm flags retune the whole layout.

Blades that taper to a point may need a hand. A straight blade of even depth, such as a bread knife or a flat carving knife, is gripped along the block's whole length and sits rock steady. A blade that tapers towards its tip only engages the slot over a short run, because it drops away from the grip as it narrows. With less of the blade held and a heavy handle out on one end, the knife can tip. The fix is a small riser under that handle. The right height depends on the individual knife, so shim the handle with folded card until it sits still, measure, and print to suit. Two of mine wanted 40 mm:

uv run python main.py --grid-x 1 --grid-y 2 --height-mm 40 --no-cutouts

Same generator, no new geometry, which is rather the point of a parametric tool.

Printing

No supports, no raft, no brim needed, as the bins print flat on their base as oriented. I've tested with PLA and 0.2 mm layers, 2 walls, 10–15% infill all works fine.

To split a bin for a smaller bed: cut on any 42 mm grid line in your slicer. The cutout geometry is designed so a grid-line cut passes through the open cutout, never through a side wall.

Feedback

The whole project is parametric and open source under Apache 2.0 (the generator) / CC BY-SA 4.0 (the models) so if none of these exact sizes fit your drawer, you can generate your own. I built it working alongside Claude Code as a coding assistant, and used a spec-driven process (writing down what a feature should do before building it) to keep the geometry honest as it grew more complex.

This is a 0.2.0 beta, which adds the knife blade block above to the original four-bin set. Feedback on fit (especially whether the slot grips your own knives without rattling) is very welcome.
Generated files (STL and 3MF) are also attached to the GitHub release.

Print Settings

Printer Brand:

Creality

Printer:

Ender-3 V3 KE

Rafts:

No

Supports:

No

Resolution:

0.2mm

Infill:

10-15

How I Designed This

Step 1. Print the original Gridfinity bins

Started by printing Jonathan Levi's (The Next Layer) "Gridfinity Complete Kitchen Collection" to get a feel for handle-cutout kitchen bins and confirm the idea actually fit my drawers before building anything of my own.

Step 2. Recreate them in Jupyter and Python

Wrote Jupyter notebooks in Python (using build123d) to reproduce similar bins programmatically, so I could tweak dimensions in code instead of a GUI. That prototyping became the seed of what's now count-spatula.

Step 3. Build a custom bin for my IKEA chopping board

Extended the notebooks into a custom bin sized for my IKEA chopping board, measured directly from the board itself, not copied from anyone else's design. This was the first bin with an explicit, non-uniform-wall pocket, and it's what's now the chop-board preset.

Step 4. Turn it into a proper generator

From there the notebooks grew into count-spatula, a proper parametric generator, with a few rounds of "print it, use it, notice what's wrong, fix the geometry":

Cutout profiles went from a filleted floor to a sharp floor corner with only the rim rounded, so a slicer can cut clean through the open notch without catching a wall.
That made it possible to align the cutout to the Gridfinity 42 mm grid, so a bin longer than your print bed (like the chopping-board bin here) can be split on a grid line and printed in sections that still fit together properly.

Step 5. Add a knife blade block

Measured my own kitchen knives (handle width, blade spine thickness) and prototyped a tapered
self-centring slot in a notebook before writing any real geometry, using the same "prove it in isolation first" approach that had already paid off for the cutout profile. The result holds knives by the blade instead of the handle, so a full set fits in far less drawer depth than a traditional block.

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Gridfinity Kitchen Containers

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3MF
chop_board_bin_4x6.3mf
Geometry Asset
STL
chop_board_bin_4x6.stl
Geometry Asset
3MF
cutlery_bin_2x4_3col.3mf
Geometry Asset

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