Product

One 4”x4”x4” laser cut wooden box, engraved on three sides, with clear acrylic top.

Procedure

I first started by finding the kerf of the laser cutter – or at least attempting to. I copied the method in the instructions of creating a partitioned rectangle, then measuring how short the rectangle was compared to the outside rectangle. Unfortunately, when I made this, the inside pieces didn’t break off cleanly and didn’t fit back together well as a result. The kerf it showed was .011 in., so I went with that for now.

I made a small test box first, using makeabox.io and the .011 in. kerf.

The tolerances were way too tight, and the edges were a bit burnt. To fix the tolerance, I increased the kerf to .02 for the next, full-scale box, and dialed down the power from 100 to 75 to avoid burning.

Once I generated the box cutout with the new kerf and larger size, I imported it into Adobe Illustrator. Then I put in some details: a nameplate on one face, the Wiess college crest on another, and a QR code leading to this blog post on a third (see pictures of these sides on the final product in the beginning of this blog).

The sixth, top face was deleted, because I planned to make this out of acrylic to make the top see-through. Once the box was cut, I took the pieces out and tried to put them together. They fit . . . even worse than before. My guess for the kerf went in the wrong direction – it actually needed to decrease to increase tolerance.

With this in mind, and yet another makeabox.io pdf generated, I tried for the third time, which finally fit together. The tolerance was still tight – there was some force required to get the pieces to snap together – but it worked.

Then the final piece – the acrylic top – was laser cut and snapped on top.

Challenges

Finding the correct kerf was the main challenge of this project. The rectangle method didn’t really work for me, and I guessed a kerf and went for it without doing many test cuts. This led to a lot of wasted wood and wasted time. If I were making this box again, I would make a few more test boxes with different kerfs to figure out what worked best before trying to make the full-scale box.

Cost Analysis

Used: 5 4”x4” squares of ¼” thick wood and 1 4”x4” square of ¼” thick acrylic

Wood: A sheet of ¼”x2’x2’ plywood, which is just slightly more than what I used, is $5.96 at Lowes.

Acrylic: An 18”x24” sheet of ¼” thick acrylic is $31.88 at Lowes. 16 sq. in. /432 sq. in. = $1.18.

Labor: 4 hours of laser cutter time at $25/hr = $100.

Total: $107.14