We have a party every week. And every week my daughter makes cake pops for one of the desserts. We decided that I should make a more permanent (and easier to clean) cake pop stand, than the cardboard one that came with a cake pop kit I gave her for Christmas. I decided I would make it out of wood using the laser cutter at the TechShophttp://www.techshop.ws

Step 1:

I used the cardboard cake pop stand as my guide. It measures 8"x5.5" and has 12 holes for the sticks to go in.
I use Corel Draw which can be used for the laser cutter at TechShop (so can Adobe Illustrator)
I made simple rectangles for the top and the 4 sides. I have the clip art program so I looked under the "borders" files and found 2 designs to combined. One for an overall design and another for the center. Actually that center is a corner design that I duplicated and then flipped until I liked the way it looked.
I like transferring files to a thumb drive to take to TechShop. My husband prefers dropbox. We used both. (always nice to have a backup)

Step 2:

My daughter wanted to make two boxes to accommodate 24 pops.
Corel duplicates easily by just hitting the 'control' key and 'd' at the same time.
Since we had particular pieces of wood scrap to use we lined up our design and set the parameters accordingly.

Step 3:

I set the power and the speed and the frequency. This was both an etching (raster) project and a vector (cutting) one. My husband taught me a trick of setting the preference to etch from bottom to top - hoping for less smoke over the project.

Step 4:

the sides of the stand were simple rectangles. I am not very good at math and so trying to cut the short sides to account for the width of the wood was a bit of problem for me.
However, the TechShophttp://www.techshop.ws came to my rescue, because I could just take a short walk to the wood shop room turn on the big sander and file the short sides down just a little shorter to make them fit nicely.

Step 5:

All ready for the next phase

Step 6:

I put on 3 coats of high gloss varnish (sanding between coats) so that this will clean up easily.

Step 7:

I glued the sides of the boxes together with wood glue using clamps and a bit of putty to hold them straight.

Step 8:

I drilled the holes in the top using the cardboard top as my guide. They are 3 sets of 4 holes with the center row being offset.
I used a dremel to smooth out the holes.

Step 9:

I glued the tops to the sides. Once set up I gave an additional glue line to the interior.

Step 10:

Once dried we gave them their test run.
My daughter said that the sticks wobbled and slanted in their holes and so the pops touched each other. She said the cardboard one seemed to have some sort of foam interior.
So I scrounged up a piece of styrofoam and cut it to fit underneath the boxes, taped it into place, and poked holes in it. Not pretty but it solved the problem, and I will replace it with nicer material, (and glue that in to place) but we had a party to get to.

I was at TechShophttp://www.techshop.ws Wednesday morning to etch and cut, and had this ready in time for the party Saturday night.