Your First Design

This walks a box from an empty window to a file you can cut. It takes a couple of minutes and nothing here is destructive — a design is just a text file.

1. Set the stock

The Stock tab describes the board every item will be cut from. Start with the three that matter most:

• Thickness — the actual thickness of your sheet, measured. Not the nominal figure printed on it: 6 mm ply is rarely 6 mm, and every finger joint in the design is cut to this number.
• Board width and Board length — the sheet you are going to put on the machine.
• Cutter diameter — the bit you will cut with. Slots are widened so a round cutter can actually enter them.

Everything else can wait. See Shared Stock for the rest.

2. Add an item

On the Items tab, choose a product — start with Project Box, the glued finger-jointed box — and add it. The form beneath is built from that product's own parameters, so each product shows only what applies to it.

Set the outside dimensions (L, W, H). The preview redraws as you type: parts appear, joints interlock, and the sheet fills up.

Set a quantity if you want more than one. Quantity is per item, so a cut list of three boxes and one tray is four line items' worth of parts on one board.

3. Read the preview

The preview on the right is the actual sheet. Underneath it, the status line reports what the nester made of the job — how many parts, how many pieces, and whether they all fit. If the job needs more than one board you will see more than one sheet.

If something does not fit, the fix is usually the board, not the design: a longer sheet, or a smaller box.

4. Save it

File → Save As… writes a .tenon file. It is YAML — readable, diffable, and safe to keep in version control alongside the rest of a project.

5. Cut it

Two ways out, covered in their own pages:

• Export job… writes a folder of CAM-ready SVGs plus a setup sheet. Any CAM package can take it from there. See Exporting a Job.
• The MapleCAM tab sends the job to MapleCAM directly, with your tools and machines already chosen. See Sending to MapleCAM.

What to try next

Turn the thickness up by 3 mm and watch every joint in the design change. That is the whole idea: the parts are generated from the parameters, so the design is never out of step with the material.