Dove tail condiment tray

1

I need to make 24 napkin/condiment trays. I was going to make it try to make dovetail joints and a slot cut for the bottom and dividers to have 3 areas for napkins in the middle and condiments in the other 2 ares. I have a bunch of 1/4 and 1/2 Baltic Birch. How do I go about making the program for the dove tails?

2

You will need a vertical workholding jig to cut the tails. There’s lots of videos on youtube about cutting dovetails on a cnc.

1 Like
3

With my enclosure I’m not able to extend my router out past the enclosure.

4

There’s videos of people making holes in the middle of their table as well.

5

I seen on youtube that Vcarve and aspire have a program for doing finger joints which I liked.

6

I wrote up a bit on this at:

and this morning, had an epiphany that they could be done using the Keyhole toolpath:

Note that if you have an SO5 Pro you’ll need to do “Gantry Shift”:

(and that it’s not possible on an HDM, and that the SO4 and Pro have a fairly narrow area)

I worked up a fixture on my SO3:

which worked well:

That said, if you don’t specifically want the appearance of dovetails, there are other joinery options — have you considered a full-blind box joint? It’s pretty easily laid out and cut (just wants a narrow V endmill):

and eventually I’ll get it fully written up at:

Like most things in life, how one does joinery is a series of tradeoffs:

  • dovetails look nice in solid wood, but require special tooling, can’t be previewed in Carbide Create, require a vertical fixture, and require at a minimum 3 setups (1 - cut parts to length/size and machine internal features, 2 - cut a pair of joints into two corners using a vertical fixture), 3 - rotate the boards 180 and cut the other two corners)
  • box joints are okay, preview in Carbide Create, require a vertical fixture, and 3 setups
  • Knapp joints are an interesting compromise w/ arguably better aesthetics, but one still needs 3 setups

There are various other techniques with other tradeoffs — if you’d like to try one, let us know the specifics of you stock thickness and the box dimensions and we can walk through setting up a file with you here on the forums.

7

Work this “joint” into your design. I’ve done this before, and it is highly configurable.

8

This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.