This year my wife has been making candles and lotion as Christmas gifts for people, but we wanted a nice way to package them. Steven Paxman’s Spring Joint Gift Box ended up being exactly what I was looking for. The problem though was that it fits only a very specific object, with a very specific thickness ply. So I went about recreating the design as a parametric drawing in Fusion 360. Here’s the result:
The joints are nice and tight. The boxes fit together snugly and don’t really flex at all once they’re all put together. The lid engraving was all done in Easel, since Fusion’s text features are pretty difficult to use. The material is 1/4" baltic birch I picked up at Woodcraft.
The one dark box was an experiment early on to see what they would look like with some stain. It ended up taking a lot longer than I expected to stain the pieces though and then I still wasn’t super happy with it because the baltic birch tends to absorb stain unevenly. So the rest I’m leaving unstained.
I’m mostly sharing all this just to share the Fusion 360 project files. I figure they might help someone else that likes the concept but wants a different size box. I’ve not an expert in Fusion 360 by any means, so it’s possible that some of the parametric features might not work as expected. I’ve adjusted them a few times though and everything has turned out okay so far. The pieces are laid out for CAM when you open the project, but if you rewind the operations a bit you can see the assembled box. Make sure you adjust the tab spacing in the CAM operations after adjusting any of the parameters.