Stacking Letter / A4 Paper Tray — modular, honeycomb floor, 20 swappable nameplates

Stacking Letter / A4 paper tray — with 20 clip-on nameplates

A proper desk in-out tray: four corner posts, an open front, and a honeycomb floor. The paper lies landscape and overhangs the low front lip, so you can pinch a single sheet out without lifting the stack. Print one tray, or six — each tier's corner pegs drop into the sockets of the tray above and lock the stack in registration.

The nameplate is the fun part: a small clip-on plate that pushes over the front lip and lifts straight off again. 20 of them are included — blank · IN · OUT · TODO · DONE · URGENT · ASAP · LATER · SOMEDAY · INBOX · OUTBOX · FILE · ARCHIVE · BILLS · TAXES · SIGN · SCAN · SHRED · MAYBE · CHAOS. Print them in a contrast filament and swap them whenever the job changes. The blank plate has a smooth 36 × 12 mm panel to write on or sticker.

No screws, no glue, no hardware, no supports.

Parts

One printed part does the real work. A single tray is completely usable on its own — the nameplate and the spacer posts are both optional.

The details that make it

• Honeycomb floor — dust and grit fall through instead of grinding under your paper, it saves filament and print time, and it looks a lot better than a slab.

• Thumb scoop in the middle of the front lip, so you can pinch the top sheet.

• Vertical flutes (reeded / Greek-column) down the side and back walls and on the nameplate face — they hide layer lines and turn a plain box into something you don't mind having on the desk.

• Self-centring stacking — each corner peg rises from a short cone that guides it into the countersunk socket above, so the tiers seat flush.

• Two-tone with no AMS tricks — the tray is colour A, the plate and posts colour B. They are separate parts; no purge tower needed.

Printing

• Material: PLA or PETG · layer: 0.2 mm · walls: 3 · infill: 10–15 %.

• Supports: none. Everything prints in its natural orientation.

• tray — floor down, open top. Walls, honeycomb holes and the scoop are all support-free; the corner-post sockets bridge ~8 mm. A brim helps if the tall thin walls lift.

• label — exported bridge-down: the 4 mm strip that rides on the lip is the bed contact, face plate and rear tab rise as vertical walls. Narrow footprint — use a brim. Don't flip it face-down, the rear tab would then hang in mid-air.

• post — stands as-is, narrow peg up.

• Bed: the A4 body is ~244 × 195 mm — fits a 256 mm bed (X1C / A1 / P1S) with margin. Switch the source to paper="Letter" and it grows to ~250 mm wide, still inside 256.

• Each nameplate is 72 × 6.1 × 13.6 mm, about 3 g. Batch several at once.

Assembly

1. Print the trays — one per tier. They need no glue.

2. Clip on a nameplate (optional). Push it straight down over the front lip's top edge, on the left-hand flat run, until it butts against the corner post. The U-channel is 2.9 mm wide over the 2.6 mm lip: snug, no glue, lifts off to swap. It parks off-centre on purpose — the thumb scoop owns the middle of the lip, and a centred plate would block it.

3. Stack. Set one tray on another; the four top pegs drop into the four bottom sockets and lock the tiers together. The open fronts line up so you can reach every tier.

4. Taller gap (optional). Drop a post onto each of the four pegs before seating the next tray: +24 mm per post layer.

For a single tray — or the top tier of a stack — set pegs=false in the source and re-export, and the top prints flush with no unused nubs.

Want a word that isn't in the pack?

Any string works, and long words shrink automatically to fit (the smooth centre panel widens, the flutes give way):

--enable=textmetrics is what measures the type — without it OpenSCAD falls back to a width estimate and a long word may sit slightly off-size.

Source

Designed from scratch in parametric OpenSCAD — no AI-generated geometry and no third-party libraries: the attached letter_tray.scad is self-contained, and it is the exact file the STLs above were exported from. Paper size, wall height, flute pitch and depth, honeycomb cell size, nameplate width and where it clips are all parameters at the top of the file.