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CAD practice: a modular desk organizer

· Fox Bright

Modelling a tray and a phone stand in the style of Ugmonk's Gather system. Sketch, extrude, cut, project, and a lot of fillets.

A white rendered phone holder module with fully rounded edges and a semicircular finger notch, modelled in Fusion.

Ugmonk’s Gather is a desk organizer built from a grid base and a set of modules that sit on it with magnets. Clean lines, every edge rounded, the same radius everywhere. It makes a good CAD warm-up because the parts are simple and the details are all in the finish. We model a tray and a phone holder; the base grid is for another day.

The tray

  1. Sketch on the ground plane: centre rectangle, 200 × 100 mm. Finish.
  2. Extrude 40 mm. Pay attention to Operation: New Body for now. If this were a multi-part design that gets screwed or glued together, each part would be a New Component.
  3. Press A and apply ABS white so the model reads like the product. Click the little download arrow on the material if it shows one.
  4. Rounded corners: edit the sketch, Fillet the four corners at 10 mm. Click all four lines before you type the value and you only type it once. Notice the timeline: the sketch edit happens before the extrude, so the extrude picks it up.
  5. New sketch on the top face. Centre rectangle 200-20 by 100-20 (type the arithmetic; it leaves a trail of what you meant), fillet 10 mm.
  6. Extrude that profile down. Dragging the arrow into the body switches the operation to Cut. -35 mm leaves a 5 mm floor.
  7. Finger notch: sketch on the front face, circle of 20 mm centred on the top edge midpoint, extrude-cut through the wall.
A white rectangular tray body in Fusion with sketch geometry showing on the top face
The tray after the pocket cut. The bottom sketch and the top sketch are both still visible.

The phone holder

  1. Ground plane sketch, centre rectangle 75 × 100 mm, 10 mm corner fillets. Extrude 80 mm, new body, ABS white.
  2. Sketch on the side face. The rounded corners make the default face awkward, so press P and Project the outer edges so you have the full rectangle to work with.
  3. Draw the side profile with the line tool: down from the top, a 14 mm slot for the phone (measure yours), a small lip, a flat. Finish.
  4. Extrude the waste regions through the body as a cut.
  5. Front face: 20 mm circle at the midpoint of the top edge, cut through.
  6. Modify → Fillet in 3D. Select every outside edge, then use Add selection set to grab the ones you missed. The geometry limits how big the radius can go, somewhere around 4.5 mm here. 3 mm looks right.
Fusion fillet dialog with the edges of a white phone holder module highlighted in blue
Filleting the phone holder's edges at 3 mm. Same radius everywhere is what makes it read as one family.