I used adobe illustrator to make vector files a lot last semester, but I have never drawn the fingers of box by myself.

I make the box in a irregular shape with multiple compartments inside. The pieces are held together through pressure fit.

For the first step of the design, I first drew 6 rectangles that corresponded to the required dimensions of compartments and arranged them in the shape as shown in the picture above in adobe illustrator. Then, I considered the thickness of the piece of plywood I used, which was 0.2 inches. I drew another 6 rectangles corresponding to previous ones and increased their width and length by 0.4 inches. For example, the 3”*3” rectangle corresponded to a 3.4”*3.4″ rectangle. After that, I started thinking of how many sides and walls my box needed. I set the height of the box as 3.7”, so the compartment depth would be 3.5”. After setting up all the basic pieces, I started to design male and female connectors as shown in the figure above. To get a tight fit, I set the width of female slots as 0.5” and the width of male connectors as 0.52”. After doing a test cut, I found that the pieces fit firmly into each other and continued with this setting. To make sure that female and male parts were in the corresponding positions, I made the fingers and corresponding slots on two pieces at the same time.

The outer walls were easy to design, but the inner ones were not. As my design required multiple inner pieces with different shapes, I spent most of the time on designing them and lining them up with the base and the outer walls from different angles.

The figure above shows the base piece of my box with all slots on it. After finishing the fingers and slots, I used shape builder to remove extra lines and combine shapes together. (REMINDER: Save the file separately before doing the shape builder step! If any finger or slot couldn’t match after the pieces are cut, it will be a lot easier to use this file directly. Doing “Release compound path” command on the shape that was shape built can separate it back to smaller parts, but it’s still way more complicated than adjusting the original one.) The drawing of all components is shown in the following figure.

After cutting all pieces out, I found that one of the inner wall and one of the outer wall couldn’t fit perfectly into the other parts, so I adjusted the positions of slots on them and recut. Additionally, two of my shapes (the ones in darker black in the figure above) were recognized as engraving part instead of cutting file although the stroke weight was set correctly. I had to use the pen tool to draw around them and did a vector only cut.

Because of the complexity of my design, it was really hard to assemble, especially when the connections relied on pressure fit. I had to sand two fingers down a bit to give one inner wall some clearance in the assembling process.

After putting all pieces together, I recognized two problems of my box.

First, inner walls didn’t fit exactly into each other. Although I intentionally designed the width of walls to be smaller and the fingers on them to be longer to make the walls easier to assemble, the actual slits between walls were wider than my expectations as seen in the following picture.

Second, though the position of female slot the wall was accurate (I checked and adjusted it for several times), this piece’s finger was bent a bit to fit in the outer walls as shown in the following picture. Fortunately, its connections with other two sides were very strong so it was still securely fixed in place.

In this project, I used two sheets of 0.2” plywood which could cost approximately $10. I spent 11 hours on designing and assembling, which could cost ~$80 according to texas minimum wage. The total cost of this box is ~$90.