Box generator for "Viking" box - assembles instantly with no glue or screws


Easy, free design of a new and improved laser cut case

Enter the size you want and your design is instantly generated for free, ready for lasercutting. Perfect for gifts, wine and ultraquick project enclosures. Strong, no gluing time, reopenable, no screws needed. By Nicolas Padfield, FabLab RUC / illutron. CC-BY-NC. Free for noncommercial use and commercial use under 10 items/year. Enter your parameters, click "Generate box", save the .SVG file and laser cut it.



Box inner height mm
Box inner width mm
Box inner depth mm
Material thickness mm
Number of connection tabs on the sides (0-3 is usually suitable) n
Number of connection tabs on the top and bottom (0-3 is usually suitable) n
Distance in for first tab on a side (4 x material thickness is usually suitable) mm
Corner radius (0 = square box corners, 20 = very rounded corners) mm radius
Radius of tab ends - for rounding of connection tabs (0 = square, 1 = completely round, 10 = slightly round) mm radius
Tab length correction (e.g. -2 = make them shorter) mm
               

The "Viking" box, with integral wedge connectors, will often be a better option than the well known (to Makers and laser cutters) standard finger box, as it is structurally stronger (does not depend on glue), does not fall apart while you are assembling it like finger boxes sometimes to, and offers an easy possibility to open and close the box - good for both gift boxes and quick boxes for your electronic, Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc. projects.

If you are using the box for electronics project enclosure, I recommend importing the .SVG into Inkscape and adding the holes you want for cables, plugs, knobs, buttons and displays before laser cutting the whole thing all at once. The tabs protruding from the top and bottom offer good ventilation for electronics projects if you cut holes or slots in the top and bottom, as they act as feet, ensuring possibility of airflow.

Suitable materials are e.g. 3 mm HDF, 4 mm HDF, 3-6 mm plexiglass, 4-24 mm plywood, or steel, aluminium or stainless steel of you have access to a >500W laser cutter.

Nicolas came up with the idea for the connectors, inspired by Viking bed connectors, while working on CNC manufacturing quick setup prefab houses designed by MOLA Systems for Roskilde festival.

The parametric generator program supports quite large sizes and thicknesses, so you can perfectly well make a 1.5 meter long suitcase out of 24 mm plywood if you want. For some material thicknesses the tabs will not be long enough - rectify this by reducing the tab length correction, e.g. from -5 to -1.

Vikingboxmaker is only at version 0.2 - feedback welcome to nicolas (at) padfield.dk . Written in PHP.

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Other good (finger) box designers:

Makercase
Rahulbotics Boxmaker
Frag den spatz Boxdesigner