Glowforge Organizer Side Trays

[cyvonneh]

Thanks for the tip
But, if I do that, won’t it limit the ability for people to re-arrange the elements so that they can fit better on the material?

[dbalindsey]

You are correct, it does limit re-arrangement some. a small price to pay for time saved. I have always done boxes this way and the sides can be moved during the original drawing process.
The fact that you are assured a good fit of the tabs, is a bonus.

[cyvonneh]

Thanks again

[geek2nurse]

Yes. It also doesn’t work if you don’t like a loose fit, since you can’t correct for kerf when using common cuts.

[ptodd]

Very kind of you to share! I have made quite a few trays and organizers. It’s nice to design exactly what your area may need.

[tammyk.email]

Thank you…very nice~

[tiffany.sellman]

This is AWESOME! vI am new to glowforge and have been wanting to create something like this. Thank you so much!

[bekktek]

Hi, I am so sorry - but I’m brand new. How do we download the template that is shared here?

[dklgood]

Welcome to the forum.
Right click the red line drawings and save the images as an svg.

[cyvonneh]

If, dklgood’s response does not work try this, if you have a MAC :
To Download: On a MAC desktop - click on the image of the file while holding the control key. Then Save As to your computer.
(I’m not sure how to do it on a PC, Chromebook, or iPad) if anyone knows, please share

[denediane]

Thank you for sharing this practical file. (-:

[cyvonneh]

I’m so glad that you like it!

[InkTree]

@geek2nurse

Yes. It also doesn’t work if you don’t like a loose fit, since you can’t correct for kerf when using common cuts.

While this is true if you try to interlock finger holes for common cuts, you can definitely compensate for kerf with common cuts along single edges (like the straight sides of pieces in this design). The trick is to just compensate for the kerf in each piece’s dimensions before they are joined (or in pre-planning dimensions before drawing if you use the pen tool to create them already sharing sides). With rectangles, that’s as simple as adding the kerf width to desired height and width. Since each side loses 1/2 kerf width, the total lost from each linear dimension is one whole kerf width. By common cutting along single edges, each piece just loses its 1/2 kerf width on that edge, vs half coming from a piece and half from scrap.

For more complex shapes, I use your brilliant stroke expansion/division method to get my kerf-adjusted final piece. I try to make as many common cuts as I can, but my vague rule of thumb is that it doesn’t work if the two pieces sharing a cut are meant to interlock along that cut, at least on more than two faces. I’m sure someone with better geometric relations skills could phrase that more effectively, with hard-and-fast rules.

Funny side note: I pulled up your post from my bookmarks so I could properly credit the user who wrote it, only to realize that user is you. Please accept my long-overdue, emphatic THANK YOU for helping to demystify finger cuts for me. I’m pretty good at most kinds of math, but I have a serious blind spot for geometric relations. Your post was the first thing I read that actually made it click.

EDIT: I think I just randomly stumbled on a way to streamline your process, at least in Illustrator. I’ll post about it over on your original thread so as not to hijack this thread too much.

[InkTree]

@dbalindsey

I have been doing common cuts as one cut, not two separate cuts. Makes the cut time much less and eliminates the chance of the joint not matching when done. The time saved is one thing that is an improvement - the accuracy of the joint is the other.
Be sure you modify any drawing by erasing the tabs on one side, so that the tab cuts are not doubled

@cyvonneh

Thanks for the tip
But, if I do that, won’t it limit the ability for people to re-arrange the elements so that they can fit better on the material?

In Illustrator, you don’t have to manually erase common lines if you get pieces positioned exactly abutted (best to snap with Smart Guides), then select both pieces and press the “outline” button in the Pathfinder window. Any stroke you have will disappear, but that’s easy enough to add back, and the touching lines will then be one.

Concerning whether to share files with separate, re-arrangeable pieces or pieces already joined for material/time saving, my approach would be to offer the files in the same way I (try to) keep my own: create all the separate shapes, then duplicate that layer, lock the original & make invisible, and then do my merging on the copied second layer. This way I can go back and rearrange differently if need be.

Actually, that was my primary method before I recently learned about Deepnest. That little amazing program will take your SVG with separate pieces and algorithmically twirl those pieces around for as long as you allow in order to find common-cut arrangements that maximize savings of material, time, or a middle-ground of both, all within an outer shape of your choosing (I tend to go with 19.3"Wx10.8"H—the rough cuttable area of the GF with 1/8" material and sub-1000 speeds, which covers most of my jobs). The resulting exported SVG has overlapping common lines already taken care of for you. It can be a bit quirky with scaling down pieces in the resulting file, but so far I’ve always found the scaling amount to be uniform among all the pieces, so I just pick a random straight edge on a piece with the Direct Select tool and check its length on my original file and the Deepnest export. Then I just divide the original length by the exported length, multiple by 100, and then select everything in the Deepnest file and scale by a percentage of that number. Back to the right size.