I did manual resizing by moving the edges out all sides at the same time, w/o changing the finger joints. i’m really bad at explaining something like this, but essentially i lined up all the box sides vertically, then used the direct selection tool in illustrator to grab all the points on the right side of all the boxes (and the bottom), and then moved them to the right as far as i needed. then i repeated the same thing on the left, and had a wider or narrower box (depending on which way you move the sides).
I have two boxes here that I made, one narrower, one taller. the taller one stacks with the original. the narrower one is for a specific purpose (holding round TUITs for the maker faire next week). the attached file below has the original on the left, a taller one in the middle (2 3/8 tall instead of 1 3/4 tall), and a skinnier, taller one on the right.
these snapped together with a perfect friction fit with some 1/8" baltic birch (a hair under 3mm thick).
Besides the stackable boxes, don’t hesitate to try other boxes. They’re all SUPER fun to make!
For the stackable boxes, go under: Boxes > UniversalBox
And then use the settings below for the stackable boxes. Feel free to change the settings depending on your material thickness and burn correction (0.1mm works well for most Glowforges).
I made a couple alterations based on the suggestions above. I attached the results in case anyone else was interested. I didn’t want to change too much. I did enlarge the design a fair bit, but didn’t add more connection points, so I’m sure this version is weaker than the original. I also added a little square I glued in so I could add cardboard placards for the contents. I wanted to engrave that, but the contents change frequently so this is more efficient.
I did have one issue, though. While it fits together perfectly with the draftboard, using the clear acrylic some of the teeth seem to be too small and don’t make a good connection. Especially on the box tops. I probably need to enlarge the teeth slightly when printing in the acrylic. Did anyone else have this problem? I didn’t realize the kerf was that much different between the acrylic and the draftboard.
Ah, nice! This should produce a better result than my manually-modified version. I actually looked at this site yesterday, but didn’t see these stackable box options. It’s hidden pretty well under the UniversalBox section.
The SVG you posted above used 0.1 as the burn setting? I think I need to increase it slightly, for whatever reason, when using acrylic. The sides of my box didn’t seat snugly.
I seem to be fighting something unusual with my setup. I had some scorching, which seems to indicate it’s putting out too much power for the Medium Proofgrade Clear Acrylic. But the settings seem to indicate the recommended setting was Power = 1, the lowest, and Speed = 500, the fastest. So I don’t have anywhere to go to reduce the burn. So I put some paper behind the acrylic, which helped, but it cut right through all 3 pieces of paper as well. No scorch marks, though.
So 0.08 would have been super-loose for me. At 0.1 I had to manually glue some parts together because they had no bite. I tried 0.2, which worked but was a bit too tight and I broke a piece. I’d do somewhere in the middle next time: maybe 0.15.
I just looked closer at your settings shots… I should clarify that I use 0.08 as the burn with the material set to 3.0mm, which works for me for 3mm BB ply and all the 3mm/medium PG acrylics. Those settings don’t work for PG ply.
those aren’t the settings for PG acrylic, those are the setting that you get if you clicked from the pg settings to the manual settings. To see the PG settings, click on the arrow to the right of “Proofgrade Cut”. There is where you can adjust them, and either click out the settings screen to set them for that job, or click the + symbol to save the settings as a preset (you can see my terribly named presets under “custom”), or click the back (<) arrow to exit the settings screen without setting anything.
I see the difference in kerf between even PG materials. There are on this list some charts that help. For instance when I do proofs with draft board, the kerf is often a little off for basswood ply.
These are cute. I’ve seen the stackable tray option, but it never crossed my mind to make little acrylic versions. They would be perfect for craft supplies.
I made a lid so that with a rubber band I could make secure storage within game boxes!
