This tool generates a specify style of card tray with a slight slope to the tray area and a thumb tab on the front edge to make getting cards out easier.

The size of the tray is governed by the dimensions of the cards that the tray is to be used for; not only width and height of the cards, but also the depth of the deck that is expected to be stored. The resulting tray will be 3 times taller than the deck depth provided, which provides the neccesary depth so that the bottom of the tray can be slightly slanted.

Currently, the generator is limited to a paper size of 8.5 x 11 inches, which somewhat limits the dimensions of the desired tray. For the most part, any reasonably sized card can be accomodated. It is actually the tray depth that can push the extents of the page, due to the design of the tray. However, since the intended purpose of the trays is to hold things like cubes and resource cards, etc, this is usually not a problem.

When printing, it's best to turn off acrobat's option for scaling the output to fit the page, lest acrobat decide that the stuff in the middle of the 8.5x11 page needs to be shrunk down to fit in the middle of an 8.5x11 page, which can only end in the horror of a card tray that doesn't fit the cards the way you expect it to.

After printing the tray, assembly is fairly straight forward:

• The solid lines are cut lines and the dotted lines are fold lines.
• The side of the paper with the print should be the bottom of the tray so that the top doesn't show any writing or fold lines.
• The front and back portions of the tray fold (from the part connected to the tray):
  • Upwards towards the top of the tray.
  • Downwards away from the top of the tray.
  • The last tab folds around inside the first two folds.
• The wings on either side of the tray are folded downwards away from the top of the tray.
• The two long tabs (the separate pieces not attached to the tray in the print out) are meant to be glued to the sides by putting the tab ends inside the folded portion of the front and the back. Glue should be applied to the two end tabs of each strip, and also the folded down "wings", to secure the sides of the tray.
• The hex shaped thumb tab folds underneath and glues to the inside front of the tray.

Here are some pictures showing the top and bottom view of some assembled trays. Note that these are pictures of the original prototype, which I glued up slightly different than the instructions above show. In paticular, when gluing the two side panels on, I didn't slide the end tabs inside the folded part of the front and back. You can do this either way.

[   Card tray generator   ]