Over the past six or so months I’ve been working on modifying the Box Creator gadget for Vectric software, it started when I wanted to be able to have different tab sizes between the bottom and sides and sort of spiraled out of control from there. The latest release include updates to the UX to make it friendlier and the ability to move dovetailed boxes around the work piece. I’ve also added the ability to create a box jointed box without using dogbones and instead you can use a center point roundover bit of half the cutting diameter to round the fingers and allow them to fit. There’s an ongoing discussion on the Vectric forums but I figured I’d let people here know as well
I have moved the source to GitHub to encourage further colaboration as well you can find the release point here: Simple Box Creator latest releases the current version as of this posting is 12.3 but look for future versions at this same point.
I downloaded the Simple Box Creator, and did a test box. This gadget is amazing. Thanks for creating it and for all of the hard work that went in to it.
Thanks for the kind words, if you find any issues please let me know, I’m continuing to work on improving, latest addition is possibly allowing you to modify the angles of the dovetails. There’s a issues tab on the github feel free to post bugs there.
The 12.4 Beta 1 release is up on the releases link from the first post. Behind the scenes it’s got a bunch of changes to the way the code is organised to make it easier to maintain, but the main visible changes are the ability to modify the dove tail angle from 60 degrees to something else (I think 80 looks pretty nice) and a bunch more validation around errors when the sizing doesn’t work to suggest sizing that would work.
I’ve been playing around with a few more things people on the Vectric forums have discussed there’s now a 12.5 Alpha 3 release available from the Releases page this release includes a bunch of work to better give feedback for tab sizing issues with the bit, allowing for tabs that are the size of your bit for example, along with better code for laying out the box on the sheet with several choices, one fits the parts to the sheet as well as it can, the other two in the drop down allow you to specify for grain direction (of course you can always move the parts and then recalculate the toolpaths)