My first try was a shop drawer full of green printed bins, labeled for roll pins and the various metric and fractional screw sizes.

By July 2025 I'd moved on to whole storage cases. Gridfinity is built on a 42 mm grid, and this one is 5x5, so about 200 mm square. They're printable, stackable, and parametric, and the full model is available. I think I'm impressed. "RBOC" is an abbreviation for "Random Box Of Crap".

A couple of weeks later I'd been working on them in the background and wound up re-implementing, and then augmenting, my favorite design. The end result is pleasing: stackable, parametric, and fully 3D printed except for the window.

In December 2025 I made custom trays for the tool drawer under the CNC mill. The cutouts for the tools at the left were done with tooltrace.ai, which was pretty easy to use.

I don't know what to say. This might be the high point of the rest of my life.

Drawers are mounted with standard drawer slides, and the CNC setup drills the screw holes for attaching them in both the drawer sides and the case sides, to make installation simple. The extra space below the lowest drawer is so I can fill it with concrete or something to keep the center of gravity low, and to provide stability if I park something heavy on top.

The drawer construction is nonstandard, but I've used something similar for years now without any trouble. Normally you'd make a box with a separate front rather than rabbeting the sides into the front, and the bottom would sit in a groove rather than just being attached flush. But I'm optimizing for CNC construction, and glue is pretty damn strong. I used to use pocket screws for attaching drawer sides to ends, and I might still, but I'm going to see if glue and nails will work. These don't need to be super heavy-duty, and it's hard to beat the strength-to-time ratio of glue and a pneumatic nailer.

Full sheet CNC router for the win: the cabinet parts are cut. On November 3 I was about to find out whether it would go together correctly and as easily as I was hoping.

By November 15 the first iteration was nearly complete.

An assembly fixture helped a lot. It's a sheet of OSB on sawhorses with small wood blocks screwed down at intervals to locate the parts.

This might be the first time I've put drawers into something within a few months of assembling the case.

There were issues galore, mostly tolerancing, which is typical for a CNC project. But I think they're all addressable, and the end result is completely usable.

The next day: now to actually put things away. Here's one of the drawers with a 3D-printed organizer in it.

Fast, cheap… The laser cutter is still shrink-wrapped in the background, and the table is upside down, 2x4 legs sticking up from a plywood top, with a caster waiting to go on.

And good enough. Here's the laser on its finished rolling table, lid open, with the packing foam and exhaust fittings on the floor below.

I needed a 150 mm to 4" vacuum hose adapter. Oh noes, wherever will I get one? I printed it.

I'd been making (slow) progress on the basement shop remodel, and in early June 2025 I was edging closer to when I'd have to move things into their new space. I tried modeling and working with the layout virtually, but I find that kind of annoying. I've done it before by cutting out paper outlines, and that works really well for me: very quick to produce, tactile, visceral. But this time I already had all the models, so I figured, why not print them out?

The biggest thing to place is the Bridgeport mill, a 2J Series 1 from around 1976. It weighs about a ton, and it was fun to get it into the basement. It shouldn't be too bad to move from one room to the other, but we'll see.

A week later it was on to the actual moving. The printed model, with its little labeled machines and furniture, has turned out to be a really useful way to visualize arrangements.

Here's what it looks like these days. I still need to add more storage to it. And clean my desk.