How else would you store your raw stock?

For a long time I’ve just been keeping all my stock in the original box it came in on the floor under my Glowforge table. I finally decided today that I hated digging through the stack to find the material I was looking for.

Enter the material storage rack. It was designed in Fusion 360 and exported to SVG using the Shaper plug-in. It’s modeled after commercial lumber racks but designed to be made out of draft board and dimensioned such that it can be cut out of two sheets (with a fair amount left over on the edge for other smaller projects). It’s sized for medium thickness, but thick might be a bit stronger.

(Please ignore just how dusty my is. It wasn’t apparent until I turned on the lights to start taking pictures. And by that point, who’s got time to stop and clean? )

I also couldn’t resist engraving a quick logo into it. Keeping the paper inside the outline gives it a nice two-toned appearance.



I was initially concerned about how much weight it could safely hold, but I’ve loaded up a good portion of my stock on it and it seems to actually make it more stable. I still think Thick draft board wouldn’t be a bad idea, but Medium is holding up well so far.

There’s still a lot of space left in it, so I guess I’ll have to go ahead and fill it the rest of the way up.

I think the craziest thing is that this was just an idea this morning. With basically napkin-level sketches, and an hour or so of tuning in kerf adjustments on some scrap (I’d never designed for press-fit joints before) this thing came to life. The power of the Glowforge!

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I’m also curious to see what other folks are doing for their storage. This works, but isn’t a super efficient use of space. If there’s a demand for this design, I can post it in Free Designs. (Skipping for now mostly because it’s late and I’m lazy. But feel free to ask and I’ll do it.)