Desk Note Pad Organizer

It’s very important to carefully measure your material thickness since you will be thru cutting the outline with tabs. Also a good idea to use a sacrificial board under the material so you don’t cut up your nice Inventables work surface. My material was .65 thick so I set my material thickness to .68 in Easel to make sure I cut completely thru. I also set my tabs to .25 wide and .120 high to make sure the tabs held when I cut the outline. Nothing worse than cutting the very last part, which is usually the outline and having the tabs not there anymore cause you didn’t set them high enough. If the tabs don’t hold, the piece will move, catching the bit at full depth, possibly flying pieces of wood or metal or both in all directions. Not good! (no need to ask me how I know.) Make double sure you have a thick enough tab that it will hold. It’s a lot easier to cut off a extra thick tab than ruining the piece (or worse) and starting all over.

I set my Z depth on the lower left corner as Easel suggests and just used the paper method to set height to material. I usually use a touch plate for my Z height, but paper is faster and Z is not critical with this cut.

I set my depth of cut to .06" with a feed rate of 120 ipm using a 2 flute .125 down cut bit. The down cut bit will give you a much cleaner top edge. Definitely my bit of choice! These setting’s work great for a well tuned machine with the Dewalt 611 router. If you have something else or doubts, you might consider cutting slower and less deep. Be safe, and experiment with what your comfortable with and what your X-Carve can handle.

The pockets were cut .45" deep which left .20 thickness of for the bottom.
Note with using a downcut bit: It’s important to keep the cut cleared of shavings so the bit can move freely in the slot. A good dust system or just following it around with the vacuum hose is a good idea.

Here’s the finished cut with tabs intact…yeah!

I use a dremel with a cut off blade to remove my tabs, but a simple utility knife works well also.

A light sanding is all that is usually required with a few coats of spray lacquer (no sanding between coats required) and your ready to set your very cool notepad organizer on the desk for everyone to admire!