Slot Together Tree ‘A’ 12 Projects of Christmas

Last Christmas we cut a variety of different slot together trees as projects in the office and that got me thinking about a design with horizontal pieces that would slot onto a vertical stand. As I ran out of time to make this, I thought I would develop it for one of our projects for 2014. The finished part looks really nice and got a lot of positive comments from everyone here. As well as looking like a Christmas Tree it also is quite pleasing as a geometric object too.
It is a reasonably complex set of vectors, although the toolpaths to machine it are quite straight forward as they only involve pocketing out some internal shapes and then cutting the rest of the parts out with Profile toolpath. The real time-consuming aspect for me was using tabs to hold the parts in place when I cut them out as this required a lot of work to remove them. I also didn’t leave enough of an allowance on the cut so I ended up with a very tight fit when I put it together, nothing that a bit of sanding and mallet could not remedy though… If you have a way to hold the part down without resorting to tabs that will make this much easier to make.
The file you can download from the link below is setup for 0.465” material. If you have different thickness plywood you will need to redraw the parts of the design that slot together to make them work for your material or use the Toolpath Allowance value to take away more or less material (currently these are set to give a looser fit than I allowed when I actually machined it). Whether you use my settings or change them you should cut a few of the parts to test fit first to ensure the best chance of success.