In this week’s assignment of making a fitted wooden box using a laser cutter. I made a 4’’x4’’x4’’ box with tab connections along the edges and I etched McMurtry’s college crest on one side and my name and “ENGI 210 Fall 2021” on the other. The box was able to snap together without using any glue or other adhesives.
I used makeabox.io to generate a pdf file to upload into Adobe Illustrator. I liked how the sides of laser-cutted wood are darker and wanted my box to look a little more abstract so I decided to not make straight edges along the outer edges of my box, to showcase the dark sides of the wood. To do this, I inserted a thickness of wood smaller than the actual thickness, so that my box has a darker outline throughout. I did 0.125’’ thickness but my wood was around 2’’ thick. To get an accurate value for the kerf, I drew and laser cut a kerf test where the kerf turned out to be 0.007’’.
Printed a kerf test to be able to calculate the kerf for the laser cutter.
Using makeabox.io to generate a pdf file for the box layout.
I then uploaded the downloaded pdf file to Illustrator and added McMurtry’s crest and my name and “ENGI 210 Fall 2021” on opposite sides of the box. To laser cut I used the combined option. My raster setting was set to speed = 40%, power = 100%, and frequency = 50% and my vector setting was set to speed = 3%, power = 100%, and frequency = 10%. The etching went perfectly fine, however the wood didn’t cut through, which came as a surprise because the kerf test came out fine with the same settings. To fix this, I reprinted the illustrator file, but this time only chose the vector cut option with the same settings. The pieces were cut through this second round and I was able to fit them together nicely.
Laser cutter did not cut through on some pieces.
Finished product after pieces snapped together.
Cost Analysis:
Wood: I used approximately six 4×4’’ pieces of plywood that are around ⅛’’ thick. A 32’’ x 24’’ piece of ⅛’’ thick plywood costs $5 at the OEDK, so the cost of the total wood used in this project is $0.625.
Laser Cutter: I used the laser cutter for approximately 30 minutes. The laser cutter used uses 80 watts which I used at 100% power, using it for 30 minutes totals to approximately 0.04kwh. In Texas, it costs $0.12 per 1kWh, so the total electricity cost of the laser cutter is $0.0048.
Labor: I asked for help from a lab assistant for approximately 10 minutes. At $10/hour, the total labor cost for this assignment is $1.67.
The total cost for this assignment is $2.30.
