Custom Plywood Tea Bag Holder
I like drinking tea, office or home, I got a whole stash of it and as such, it was time to make my own custom plywood tea bag holder.
Making a simple functional box is pretty straight forward, it’s the purpose assigned to said box that differentiates it from other boxes I’ve made in the past for clients and personal use at CNCROi.com.
The reason why I find this type of project dead simple for me is because I spent YEARS designing far more complex plywood structures which you can get a glimpse of at CNCKing.com and projects including this custom steamboat model, design through fabrication.
So you can understand why box to me, regardless of intended use, is a break from my regular duties making awesome projects for customers far and wide across North America and the Caribbean.
Having a whole shop available when it comes to tooling and equipment for woodworking, the simplest approach is often the best, in this case, just dropping the chunk of scrap plywood sheets into the laser and cutting away, it makes quick work of quarter inch 6 mm plywood with incredible precision.
When it comes to larger projects, to be more cost effective and faster, nothing beats our full sheet CNC router when it comes to making custom plywood projects come alive at CNCROi.com.
If you wanted a box to be small enough to hold tea bags or big enough to literally ride on, we can help you design through fabrication.
Yes, ride on… here’s something I designed and fabricated when I lived in Perth, Australia a few years back using a far smaller CNC router that I have to this day at CNCROi.com.
Plywood is a wonderful material, fully underrated as it’s strong, flexible and incredibly easy for machinery to work with due to it’s composition, it’s wicked overkill for this tea bag holder box but I always prefer something too strong and durable than not enough.
We have a very powerful CNC laser, as such, we can easily cut materials far thicker and denser than plywood, when it comes to custom fabrication with wood, it’s generally a toss-up between plywood or MDF if live edge wood species is out of the budget.
The one huge advantage of CNC laser cutting plywood when it comes to nesting is that I don’t have to account for a “big” round spinning bit like I have to on the CNC router but what I gain in space, I lose in speed.
If you are wondering how much our projects that I design scale, take a look at the other “mini” version of my wooden big wheels model, unlike the video you saw above that’s CNC router cut using a ShopBot Desktop with plywood, this version is the same model made using MDF and a laser.
and part 2.
As mentioned, a box is a lot more straight forward than something intended to be more art than functional, especially a tea bag holder box.
It’s quite amazing when I get the opportunity to laser cut a project out when you realize that there is nothing touching the plywood (in this case), it’s just a beam of light going through wood, there is no push or pull or stress put into or onto the material as you get with a CNC router and less so on a CNC waterjet.
Of course, plywood is also a wonderful material for use in furniture making, check out my CNC laser station that I use to this day in the CNCROi.com shop just about everyday!
Custom furniture to toys and literally anything inbetween, CNCROi.com can design through fabricate it for you in any quantity!
After the laser cutting of the plywood tea bag holder is finished, as you’ve seen in a lot of my videos, it’s time to remove the masking, it saves a lot of sanding time as removing paper is faster than making dust.
Right now my shop is literally filled in every sense of the word with BIG projects that are being fabricated but what’s great is taking a step back and doing projects that are smaller in scale.
There is something magical about designing, it’s like being in a waking dream where your entire focus is on moving virtual pixels to form something neat that will then be fabricated in real life.
If you are wondering where you saw those solid oak dominos in the photos below, they are from a project I did a while back that I used to show clients what’s possible using everyday wood laying around, as it is with most of the demos I made on CNCROi.com‘s blog and video posts.
With a good design, materials can be easily interchanged and to be honest, some of my best work was made using plywood and other “cheap” materials over far more extensive solid wood options that CNCROi.com can offer.
When it comes to deciding whether you want to focus on design or materials, design always wins out, corporate awards through furniture, it’s the WOW factor.
For this custom tea bag holder box, I was actually using three different grades and ages of plywood I had laying around the shop, when ever the scrap pile gets a bit high, I think of something I can make using it up to clear-out some space for projects.
After designing, cutting, assembling, and gluing the custom tea bag holder together, it’s time to label it as to it’s use, this is for personal fun as I knew it’s intentions and reason for being before laying the first pixel down for this CNCROi.com project.
Tea Stash seems to me like the best name for this tea bag holder made out of scrap plywood, looks great, and the hinge that’s part of the design means I don’t need to affix any hardware to it.
Once filled with tea bags, this custom tea bag holder box was ready for immediate use, and it’s been a wonderful addition to my kitchen.
Have a custom project you need designed through fabricated?
Contact CNCROi.com right now!