On my wish list forever, a silverware drawer where all the stuff doesn’t slide all over the place. Here’s the final product, story and learnings from a laser newbie to follow:
The story begins with a standard commercial silverware insert and a bunch of junk that collected around it. Every time I closed the drawer the tray would slide around… ARG
Before:
Used the Tabbed box maker tool (GitHub - paulh-rnd/TabbedBoxMaker: Inkscape tabbed box generator plugin - quickly design complex "finger jointed" boxes) to make an .svg 6x6 cubby box to the size of my drawer. To save space I removed the side walls, but in the final product some of the dividers aren’t well supported, so I regret that choice. Should have at least kept a wall on the front.
Then I laid out my drawer and played around with how I wanted everything to fit together, making cardboard pieces along the way. Note, my drawer is bigger than the GF foot print, so I identified zones and chopped up my model appropriately in Inkscape. With the .svg file from the Tabbed Box Maker it was really easy to grab a bunch of tabs/slots and move them around or delete them. My only booboo there was I forgot to delete some slots where I removed some of the partitions. That’s ok, it’s my first tabbed project, it will be a conversation piece.
Key tip, keep making cardboard mock-ups until everything is perfect. Can’t tell you how many tweaks I made in cardboard land (e.g. adding scallops so it’s easier to remove the silverware from the tray.
One of my favorite bits was making an L shaped space for the bottle brush. Don’t find those in commercial products.
Final oh-@#$% was I didn’t run the tabbed box maker for the final material thickness. So in final assembly everything was super loose (lots of glue followed). Of course I didn’t have the right clamps for this, but everything is better with some wine and nice oil and vinegar. One more newbie mistake, I didn’t think through my gluing order very well and had to pull apart and re-glue a few parts.
But super happy with the final results in proofgrade cherry plywood: