Seeking eyes on this design! (Total Newbie)

elizabeth_schmidt

Hello! 
I'm in an ENGR 101 class and our final project is to design a desktop organizer. Our teacher did a sink or swim sort of thing to see what we could teach ourselves about the program, and I think I'm doing pretty good for having not really touched it before. 
However, we have to set it up for laser engraving and I'm not sure how to make the tabs, other than manually adding them one at a time, and subtracting them, is that the right way to do it? 
Does anyone see any real obvious mistakes on this? I wasn't sure how to make it a solid piece, so my idea is to glue the left and right parts together. The flap *should* have the ability to pull up and expose the inside of the box...
Here is my design: 
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/75db4c2837e7d077bd9e40cb/w/f91d9bc401bba767a2b882a6/e/857f73a15bbbf131dcf834a8

Thanks, friends!  
I'm super excited to join this community and learn more! 

tim_hess427

Hi @elizabeth_schmidt, 

I think this looks pretty good for a first time! A few thoughts come to mind:

• It looks like the "flap" is supposed to rotate when it's assembled, right? I think it may interfere with the front lip on the box. 
• It looks like you found the custom feature for adding tabs. That'll probably be the easiest way to add them. If you want to add them manually, you can model multiple tabs in one sketch, or you could model one tab and use a feature pattern to replicate it along an edge. 
• How are the boxes going to be made? Are you going to split each side for each box so that they can all be laser cut as well?

lemon1324

In "stock Onshape" yeah, that's how you'd have to do the tabs.  However, one of the really nice things about Onshape is the scripting ability - there's plenty of features people have written to do specific tasks like this in an easier way.
In this case, you're looking for my suite of laser-cut design tools, Laser Joint, Kerf Compensation, and Auto Layout. @alnis_smidchens did a brief video tour of the joint FS, here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPoJ484-7tI
If you do decide to use these tools you'll need to change how you're doing the actual modeling a little to meet the prerequisites for the features, but nothing too drastic.

elizabeth_schmidt

tim_hess427 said:

Hi @elizabeth_schmidt, 

I think this looks pretty good for a first time! A few thoughts come to mind:

• It looks like the "flap" is supposed to rotate when it's assembled, right? I think it may interfere with the front lip on the box. 
• It looks like you found the custom feature for adding tabs. That'll probably be the easiest way to add them. If you want to add them manually, you can model multiple tabs in one sketch, or you could model one tab and use a feature pattern to replicate it along an edge. 
• How are the boxes going to be made? Are you going to split each side for each box so that they can all be laser cut as well?

Thanks! 
I realize now I'm gonna have to make each "face" of the box separate, rather than an extruded shape....arugh. Back to the drawing board. 
Thanks for the note on the front tab, I'll shorten it on MK2. 
It's gonna be sent to a laser engraver in the schools shop. 

bruce_williams

@elizabeth_schmidt

check out the Split command which will aid in creating separate panels.

michael3424

@elizabeth_schmidt - FWIW, I've used @lemon1324's Laser Joint Featurescript on several occasion's to make finger joints similar to what you are designing and found Laser Joint to be a tremendous time saver.