Voronoi pencil holder

I got bored with a plain black plastic pencil holder on my desk at work, so a slightly-extended lunch break later, and…

Much better :smiley:

Made with Inkscape, :proofgrade: medium maple plywood, and a little bit of randomness. Every face of the box is unique. The entire design took less than an hour to plan, and ~18 minutes to cut.

As I’m sure you can guess, peeling off the masking was oddly satisfying. However, my honeycomb bed is now full of tiny little pieces of wood…

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A simple ‘box’ but made elegantly beautiful. Very nice!

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Brilliant and beautiful!

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SO I have to ask. How did you make the pattern? I just have to do this for a project and wound up generating the voronoi pattern using Rhino and Grasshopper. Turned out to be way more complicated for the same results.

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You could try sending an email…

to: beta@users.bots101.com
subject: Make a thick Voronoi Pattern using 100 points. thicken by 5 pixels. cut with the shape of a square. add thin black border frame. Make hi res smooth SVG file.

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@dmi - Awesome box! Great work! The emails to the bot just blow my mind. I will have to try that. @bwente :open_mouth: :smiley:

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Nicely done! :smile::+1:

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Inkscape has a Voronoi extension, which made things easy. I’m happy to write up a detailed explanation later. Would it be best in this thread, or as a new post in a different section of the forum?

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That’s amazingly cool!

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That’d be great!!

I’d say new thread and crosslink.

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love this!

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Very nice! :sunglasses:

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Tutorial posted here: Voronoi pencil holder in Inkscape

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Very nice. The Tabbed Box Maker extension in Inkscape is very versatile. Using millimeters too gives me a bit more perspective when doing kerf, tab clearance and material thickness. I’ve been cranking out little boxes like crazy in cardboard and the precision is incredible. Nice way to decorate it!

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I wonder how hard it would be to extend the pattern to the edges and use it to design the joints?

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This turned out great! Love the pattern!

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I’m not quite sure I understand — can you explain a bit more?

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I’m not sure I understand either. :wink:

Basically I love the design but the square joints throw it off a bit for me. I was just contemplating how you might be able to extend the pattern all the way to the edges and then create a complementing pattern on the adjoining face that would act as the finger joints.

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Ahh! An interesting idea, certainly. I could extend it to the top, but I’m not sure about the corners. I wouldn’t want the tabs to get too fragile — my tolerances were tight for this build, so it needed a bit of a helping hammer to encourage it to fit together properly :laughing:

The only way I can immediately think of to do this is to have some kind of branching effect coming from the sides, with very narrow tabs (or wider tabs that subdivide themselves). Remember that a narrow tab with a large slot on one side means there must be a narrow slot and a large tab on the other.

Any idea if there is a plug in for corel draw

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