How do you make a pattern that scales from one end to the other?
I've run into this problem multiple times and have never come up with an answer that doesn't require a lot of work to get it done, and right now I have a case where I need many different steps/sizes- I've been thinking of designing some 3D printed toolbox organizers and I need things like a wrench holder that holds wrenches from 10mm to 19mm in 7 steps, the wrenches on the bottom left in this picture:
The ones on the right are SAE and slightly different sizes, I have 3 more drawers of different wrenches, the smallest set has 4 wrenches, the largest 19, all sorts of different sizes and configurations, so a quick way of scaling both the spacing and size would be necessary to make this practical. What I was thinking about is basically a sawtooth shaped rack, that holds the wrenches up at an angle so they take up less space and use a bit of the available height in the drawer but save surface area, something like this but more robust (maybe the two sides connected together, I have a few of the black ones in my main wrench drawer and they work OK but only work well with wrenches of a specific size range):
Other examples just from just this project are organizing this drawer, things like these endmills (box on the left), fly cutters (3 things in the top middle), drillbits (those are 9/16" to 1-1/4" in the box of blue boxes in the middle) or the pile of sockets that everyone has.
All of these things are repeating patterns that change in both size and spacing in a regular interval.
The closest thing that I've seen to doing this quickly/well is Lars Christensen's video here at the 17minute mark where he uses the 'adjust' option in the pattern tool:
https://youtu.be/pUm2Uy3OMw4
(I just watched it a few minutes ago, I haven't quite wrapped my brain around if you can "adjust" both size and spacing yet)
I've wondered if you could get this to work using parametric modeling and some math but like it would be clumsy and setting up the parametric model would likely not be necessary for most uses (like I probably would want to customize the wrench racks for the specific wrenches so I'd only use the parametric model for 2 sets of racks and then setup another).
How would you do it? Ideas?
