Joey left the frame twice while we were talking, both times to go get a part.
The first one he came back with was the catch. Before it existed you screwed his drawer system together. After it, the plastic itself does the work. Assembly went from a couple of minutes of screwing things down to a split second, and it comes back apart just as fast. People kept telling him he should do a compliant mechanism, and his honest answer was that he didn't know what that was.
Then he told me how it actually happened. He had the rough idea of it, and he was in the shower, and he thought about putting it in one exact spot on the design. He mocked it up. First try, it worked. He said that was probably the most excited he's been in a long time, and you could hear it.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Joey has been building Modulith since 2019. It started as one drawer under a table. People asked for wider, then taller, then on top of the table instead of under it, and he kept picking away at it for years until he had something like two hundred files on Printables alone and hundreds more spread across other sites. He called it a mid project crisis. So at the end of last year he started over. He rebuilt the cases and he rebuilt the drawers, 18 drawer sizes and two styles of drawer, and they look almost the same as the old ones. That's his own joke about it. A lot of what he added is for things he hasn't invented yet.
He also built a planner that runs in your browser, and that's the thing I'd go look at first. You start with one drawer and you keep adding until you've laid out a wall. It previews the build in real filament colors, and I mean the actual characteristics, the glitter and the way light goes through it and the little lines the printer leaves on the surface. Then it hands you the parts list for whatever you drew and the links to go download it. He's been in it for a couple of months and he's clearly having a good time, because there are coffee mugs hidden in the render with sayings on them, and there's a cinematic mode he put in for no reason except that he wanted to see it.
Here's what I didn't expect. He can't find his own screws. All those cabinets behind him are prototypes and he keeps robbing them for parts, so the guy who designs storage is, in his words, making his life less organized with his system. He said if he ever actually organized his chaos he'd be able to give people things for gifts.
The core of the system is free and it stays free. He sells decorative parts to pay for the time, and the one that took off is a little edge label he's sold over 500 of, which he still doesn't quite understand. The club that supports the project started at three dollars and he's locked into that price now. Somebody who knows this business better than either of us told him he should raise it. He can't.
The thing that changed how he saw any of it didn't happen online. He set up at a printer festival and lost his voice on the first day because people kept coming up to the table. Until then he had a few comments a week to go on. He told me he had zero idea there was that much interest. I've said it on the show before and I'll say it again here, there's a difference between a keyboard and a handshake.
One more thing, because it's his advice and it's better than mine. Somebody in his community printed a drawer system with over two hundred drawers in it for their Lego collection and it takes up half a room. Joey's reaction was that it scares him and it's amazing at the same time, and he's worried a build like that puts new people off. So he says print one drawer. Print a case, drop a drawer in it, see if you even like it. You don't have to plan the whole wall.
So what have you been putting off because you were planning the whole wall? Come tell me about it.
Find Joey and Modulith: https://modulith.systems
Joey on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jerrari3D
Come hang out: https://discord.gg/asylumlifemakes
Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.