But they’re not always available in a suitable size for typical magazines.
There are a number of commercial options:
So there is certainly precedent for wooden boxes — we’ll try for an inexpensive material, since this is going to be a fairly large project (sorry Nomad owners) — Luan Plywood is available at most home centers, usually as underlayment, a bit of care should allow one to pick out a sheet in good shape which can be cut up to fit on the bed:
We need one additional variable — Partspacing, and if we are going to have an angle to this, we should also allow specifying that slope — rather than specifying the angle directly, we can use the proportion / percentage at which the angle will begin along the front height, and end along the back top:
But, it’s a little large for the working area, so maybe we’ll use Imperial after all (that’s the nice thing about variables, they can easily be changed out):
For a given joint edge we want an even number of pins on one side, and an odd number on the other.
We need to ensure that the pins are proportional to the material thickness, and will admit the endmill — easiest way to do that is to add:
pinwidth == Thickness + EndmillDiameter + X
where X == the additional length needed to make things come out evenly along the width (note that if the box is not square / proportional width of pins and their number will differ along each axis).
The first number we need is the number of pins on a given edge.
A bit of judicious math and calculations (and changing the bottom board to not include the dimensions of the fingers so that they can instead be added) results in:
if only we could cut such angles conveniently — unfortunately, making these cuts as shown would require one setup for each set of joints, and a careful measuring of placement — the bottom alone would require 4 setups. Not really practicable.
Hey Will, do you keep these tutorials somewhere like the Wiki with a short description? I guess they are here in the tutorial section but it may be hard to find what you are looking for especially if it was done a while ago. We may have no use or time for this at this time bnut later, we may want to get back to it or we may have missed one of your posts on something of interest. I have no idea what you covered last year for example and maybe that info would be useful in a project.
If you have a repository of tutorials, can I suggest that when you post these tutorials, you put a reference in the first post of the thread as to where these tutorials are kept.
Unfortunately, we don’t have signature blocks here — I’ll have to give that some thought.
I’ve cleaned up the .scad file a bit, and posted it to: https://github.com/WillAdams/Design_Into_3D/tree/master/box/fingerjoint/magazine and made a .dxf — next up is puzzling out doing the joinery in Carbide Create, then I’ll have to work out a technique for automating making vector files using METAPOST or some other tool.
I’m excited about making simple boxes. Laser folks have it easy with makercase and this looks like the equivalent with the CNC. Looking forward to you releasing this Will.
