invisible plate stand

I wanted an invisible version of this plate/book stand, because I wanted to put a clear plate on it, and didn’t want to see the stand right through it. The size and shape seemed to fit perfectly otherwise.

First I scanned it on a flatbed scanner next to a ruler:

Then I imported it into Autodesk fusion, drew a test line to scale the drawing. Then I traced out a quick rough shape with lines, and just used a bunch of manual filets to smooth the corners to match:

Sketched up a tab, split in two sections, and patterned a copy of it above:

Extruded 1 version of the tabs:

Then suppressed that feature and extruded the other version:

3d preview of how it should look in 3mm acrylic:

Quickly sketched and cut a calibration piece to get the right snug thickness for the tabs:

Adjusted the tabs to the final thickness, then exported an SVG of the face for each half, using the autodesk shaper origin plugin. Loaded it into LightBurn and cut it out with the laser:

Fits like a glove:

The final product!