We were tasked with making a box using the laser cutter. The box should be able to hold itself together without glue, screws, tap, and any other attachment tools. Additionally, the box had to be at least 4” x 4” x 4”, it had to say my name on one face, and on another face it had my college crest. My box fulfilled all of these requirements and I was very satisfied with my box.

I first used makerbox.io to create the dimensions of the box. The picture below shows the dimensions, kerf, and thickness used. I initially wanted a 4”x4”x4” box and the thickness of the wood was about 3/16in thick. So I subtracted the thickness from 4in. However, my box ended up being 4.20”x4.20”x4.20” which I don’t really understand.

I then imported the pdf file of the box to adobe illustrator. The imported file has very line on the page as independent, so I used Ctrl A and Shift M to create 6 different shapes, which represents the faces of the box. I then used the text icon to add my name, Engi 210, and fall 2021. Next, I went on google and looked up the baker crest. I copy and pasted it into the adobe illustrator file and sized it accordingly.

Finally, I was ready to laser cut the wood. For the etching, I used 50 speed and 50 power. For the vector cut, I used 4 speed and 100 power. Initially it took 25 minutes because for some reason the laser cutter thought my file was an image, so instead of etching the college crest and my name, it was trying to etch the white space. So the next cut, I deleted my college crest and my name. I did only the vector cut, and it was able to cut completely through the wood for 2 pieces. So, for the next cut I kept the power the same but I increased the speed to 5 because I didn’t want more burned edges. After the second run through, and some poking, I was able to get all the pieces to assemble my box.

It was fairly easy to assemble box and it seemed very stable. I was very satisfied with the final product. I was thinking of maybe sanding the box, but it honestly didn’t need it and there was a slight sanded effect from the slight rastering of the whole box.

I used 74.088 in^2 of plywood ($1.41), 1.5 hours of labor ($11.25), 40 minutes of laser cutting ($13.33), 1 hour help from lab assistant ($12). So the total cost of this assignment is about $38.