Show and Tell - let us know what you're doing!

[Neale]

My wife is an embroiderer/felt maker. I also earn brownie points by making odds and sods for her use. These are typical of a set of trays that I made to fit in the widely-available range of "Really Useful Boxes", of which she has quite a lot.One of these boxes full of reels of thread wastes a lot of time whenever you are looking for one in particular so I designed and made the stacking trays. I like using the tab-and-slot method of construction, and I try to ensure that all loads are taken mechanically by the tab design. These ones use small dabs of superglue just to stop them falling apart although there is little load taken by the glue. Each tray has a slot in the base plus matching cutout in the central divider so that the handle on the one below has somewhere to go. This is also helps when you just have them stacked on the table as they don't slide off each other. Top tray in each box doesn't have the projecting handle just so it fits in the plastic boxes. I designed them in Fusion 360 using parameters for key dimensions so that it is relatively easy to create the different sizes. I worried a lot about corner clearance in the slots - can't make square corners with a round tool - and eventually settled for the fillets as seen here. Other projects have used a smaller cutter and so the corner fillets are a little less obtrusive. However, these weren't designed with aesthetics high on the agenda - more "what can I knock up quickly!"


Really, this kind of thing just emphasises my point about how useful a CNC router is for fairly ordinary projects - would have taken ages to do something like by hand.