SMD box holder

I got hold of a lot of SMD component sample boxes a while back, they are really nice to store small components, screws and of course SMD parts in. But they are not stackable and do not really fit anywhere in a practical way. I found out that 10 of them in 2 rows of 5, have almost the same dimensions as most of my component storage boxes, so I decided to design a holder for it. The easy choice was to lasercut it, so I designed the holder for that, but I ended up getting it cut on a CNC machine, since I was at a friend’s workplace and they just happened to have one ^_^ I made the whole design in Autodesk Inventor, which made it possible to assess the design better before cutting it. After 2-3 iterations I ended up with a design as shown below.

After that I exported the DXF files to Illustrator in order to be able to more easily set up all the parts for laser cutting/CNC machining.

The CNC was not happy with the DXF files that Illustrator produced, so i had to have the whole thing through CoralDraw to get an HPGL file, that the CNC would eat. In the future i will try and use CoralDraw more, since it is way more suited for 2D CAD work.

I am really proud of the final result, i had to do some sanding, but the whole thing fits together without any glue.  I found out that i made an error in my calculations, so there is a bit to much space for each SMD box, the holder is still perfectly usable though.

The assembly and final result can be seen in the gallery below.