Every Bench Brass case ships empty. That was the idea from the start: you fill it with the trays you actually use. It also left you with a puzzle to solve before you bought anything. Which trays, how many, and will they all fit?
Now you can solve it on the page. The case builder puts a case in front of you in 3D. You fill it, arrange it, close the lid on it, and put the whole thing in your cart.
Pick a case, then its colors
Start with the Pocket, the Day or the Range. Then pick the case color and the lid color, four of each. The case on screen changes as you click, so you can try Burnt Orange with a Black lid before you settle on Army Green with Army Beige.
Fill it
All sixteen of our trays and bins are in the builder: Headcount trays in two calibers, and Bay bins in ten sizes. To add one, right-click inside the case, or press and hold on a phone, and a menu opens. Headcount trays are sorted by caliber, then by size. Bay bins are sorted by their short side, then their long side. You never scroll through a list of sixteen. Pick one and it drops in where you pointed, or in the nearest spot it fits. Anything that won't fit is grayed out before you try it.
From there, drag trays around and they snap to the grid. Right-click a tray to turn it or take it out. With a keyboard, the arrow keys move the selected tray, R turns it, and Delete takes it out. Top view looks straight down, which helps when you're planning all 42 squares of a Range.
If you change your mind about the case, your trays come with you. Whatever fits in the new case stays. Anything that doesn't comes out, with a note saying which.
Close the lid
Once it's full, close the lid. It swings shut on its hinge the way the printed one does, and the latches close over the front. Through the window you see what you'd see on the shelf.
Into the cart
When it looks right, Add to cart puts the case in your cart with every tray listed under it, so the cart reads like the case you built. Each piece costs the same as it does on its own page. Your layout goes with the order too, so we can see how you arranged it.
How we made it
The models in the builder aren't drawings of our parts. They're our parts. Every case, lid, tray and bin on the page comes from the same mesh we send to the printer.
Those meshes are heavy. A case and its lid run to hundreds of thousands of triangles, far more than a phone should be asked to download. So each one goes through a script that thins it out, keeping the shape and dropping the triangles the eye won't miss.
Our first pass went too far. It kept about a tenth of each part, and the grid in the case floor came out faceted, like it had been cut from card. If the models look rough, you can't tell what you're buying. So we went back and kept far more: about a third of each case, and more than half of each tray. All the models together still come in under 5 MB, and the page loads only the case you're looking at until you start adding trays.
The rounds in a Headcount tray are one round, drawn again at every position. That keeps a full tray light.
The lid took the most work. Our hinge isn't a single pin. It's a set of links that lift the lid and swing it back. The builder works out where each link sits at every angle from the same dimensions as the printed parts, so the lid on screen follows the same path as the real one.
The case itself is built on the Modern Gridfinity Case by Matthew (@unrepentantgeek), shared under the MIT License. The builder's models are made from it, so that credit and license go with them.
Where to find it
Build is in the menu at the top of every page. Each case page has a Build yours link that opens the builder with that case already in it. It's also the first button on the home page.
If there's a tray you want that isn't in the menu yet, ask for it. That's how new trays get made.