I have a pocket watch that belonged to my great grandfather. I don't know much about it or him. I'm told he died of a heart attack when he was only 45. Supposedly he was a "bag man" for the Creole Mafia in New Orleans. His job was to collect money from gambling houses around the city and deliver it to a leader named "Beansie". After these trips, he always picked up his grandkids and took them to get ice cream. What a legacy. All I have for certain is this watch, an Elgin pocket watch from approximately 1912, based on the serial number. Excellent condition. To be honest I forgot I even had it for years, until a friend mentioned that they had one, and I recalled that I did too. I dug it out of the back of my closet where it had been sitting in a cardboard box. I thought it deserved better.
I would love to carpenter a nice wooden box, but I live in an apartment in San Francisco and I don't have access to any fine carpentry tools right now and I don't have any room at home to make a mess. So I'm limited to 3D printing for the time being. After taking the watch to get cleaned and oiled, I drew up a simple box to hold the watch, its chain, and the old mismatched hands that I didn't want to throw away. Simple enough. Two printed pieces held together with 2mm pins. But then I decided it needed some visual interest.
I liked the engraving on the watch case, a weird hodge-podge of visual styles, and I started copying it exactly before deciding to go with something simpler and more cohesive. I settled on a simple acanthus scroll pattern. I like hand engraving. I looked around for a pattern to trace, before eventually asking Google Gemini to draw one up for me. That actually worked quite well, after I came up with a suitable prompt. I had to tell it to draw an acanthus scroll in a linotype style, with a few other specifications. It took about an hour to draw up the original box, and then many hours to trace the pattern on the lid. Originally I tried using a 3D Texture in Solidworks, but the results were pretty bad. Tracing manually and debossing worked much better. First I printed it like an actual engraving, with the pattern cut into the box lid surface, but then I decided to do a multi-color print and that turned out nicely. There are a few details I'd like to improve like the spacing of some of the finer lines that produced some aliasing, but it's not bad for a first draft. It holds a 45-48mm watch quite nicely with a thick, plush cloth to insulate it.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7315481
