A while back, an on-set medic gave me a bandage. I’m a superglue guy, personally, but this bandage made me stop and ask to see the box/brand of bandaid. After he showed me the box, I had 6 boxes on the way to my house from Amazon.

They were the Curad Extra Long Antibacterial Bandages; they are almost twice as long as normal bandaids, and actually work on fingers.

I carry two med-kits on set, a basic first-aid kit (booboo kit) and a trauma kit (which I’ve never used and hope to never use). 90% of the time I open the boo-boo kit for someone, I’m grabbing 1 of 3 things. Ibuprofen, tweezers, or a bandaid. (If you don’t have tweezers for removing splinters in your kit, get some. I use them all the time on-location when people get ‘stuck’. Carry 2 single-use isopropyl-alcohol wipes next to them to sanitize between uses. Sterilize in front of person before handing to them, and after they hand it back)

The only downside to carrying the bandages, was the cardboard box. It is great for sitting in your medicine cabinet, but after two weeks in the med kit, or in a backpack, the box was looking rough. Satisfactory for a couple months, but it doesn’t look the most sterile, and eventually the box will fail to the point that the sterile paper bandage wrapper is compromised.

In an effort to teach myself CAD, I set out to make a simple box.

My first versions were PLA+. They were simple and were held together with a simple rubber-band double looped around the vertical length. The Southern California sun melted the box, making it soft and the rubber band made an indentation, deforming the plastic. PLA is such an awesome material, and a lot of its downfalls are solved with PLA+, however the temperature drawbacks are still there.

Enter PETG. I haven’t been printing with it for long, but lately I have been messing around with PETG. It has a much higher resistance to deforming due to temperature, and so far, through my non-data-driven tests, it has been performing incredibly well in the full California sun, opposed to its PLA+ counterparts.

I’ve toyed with the idea of a mechanical locater/box-release or a latching system, but at the end of the day, mo’ simple is mo’ better, and I feel a rubber band is the best solution I can think of at this time. Certainly, a rubber band has a limited lifespan, but its cost compared to utility is great.

Printed with a .6mm hardened steel nozzle, 1.75mm Overture Black PETG. Textured PEI build plate.