Making paper boxes with a plotter cutter
Most boardgames come with fantastic organizer inserts that hold all the tokens, meeples, cards, and boards in place when the game is packed up. But a couple of boardgames in our growing collection don't have these inserts. Surely that's a problem that can be solved with some paper, code, and a stabbing robot!
I recently bought a (used) plotter cutter, specifically a Silhouette Cameo 4. A plotter cutter is a machine with a knive (scary, I know) which it can move along one axis, while moving material on a cutting mat along another, orthogonal, axis. It's like a printer, but instead of printing ink it prints stabs and cuts. I don't think this analogy really works...
Making custom inserts for board games was one of the reasons I got this machine, and making paper boxes to hold cards or materials felt like a good starting project to ease into this new hobby.
But while paper boxes aren't very complex, I didn't want to go through the trouble of creating an outline for a box I need today, and then go through that same process again if I need a box of a different size in the future.
Below is an interactive generator that creates an outline for a box of a given size, along with some instructions for how to cut them.
Interactive Generator
The form below lets you generate an outline of a paper box in SVG format. The form lets you specify the (inner) dimensions of that box, as well as the thickness of the papeer.
Cutting instructions
You can download the SVG and import it in Silhouette Studio (requires Designer Edition or higher).
- Drag and drop the downloaded file onto the design space in Silhouette Studio and position it on the print media.
- Select "Send"
- Select "Line" mode
- Configure the "Cut" action for the red outline
- Configure the "Score" action for the blue outline. If there is no option to score the material, make sure you selected a material that allows scoring (e.g. cardstock).
Assembly should be self-explanatory. The only glue surface is the folding flap on the very right of the outline.
First Application
As a first application I printed four boxes for the removable markers in The Isle of Cats: Explore & Draw. Here's how they turned out:
