Laser Cutter: Letter Paper Storage Trays

Paper sheets must lay flat in storage, but it’s impossible to extract a single sheet from a tall pile. So I converted some moving boxes into stackable trays, each holding about a ream of paper:

The starting point is a stackable Universal Box from boxes.py, with one end reshaped to become a tray. One Home Depot Large moving box provides enough 4.0 mm cardboard to make four trays, with one side of the box left over for future projects:

The gray rectangle in the middle is the LightBurn workspace grid representing the 700×500 mm laser platform:

Contrary to the screenshot, I move all the layouts off to the side leaving the platform grid clear. The blue rectangles around the layouts represent the various box flaps / sides, so I can:

• Click a layout (which is grouped with the surrounding rectangle)
• Click Ctrl-D to duplicate it
• Hit P to put the duplicate at the middle of the platform grid
• Lay the corresponding cardboard sheet from that box part on the platform
• Align the layout with the cardboard using the camera
• Fire The Laser

Copious application of hot melt glue gloms all the pieces together.

I added support beams under the cardboard bottom plate:

A 2 mm arch in the top of those strips puts a camber into the sheet to counteract the natural sag from carrying five pounds of paper. The four trays at the far left lack that camber and cry out for a Mulligan.

Some day the Basement Shop™ won’t smell like a campfire.

The LightBurn SVG layout as a GitHub Gist: