I love travelling and I have always wanted to have something that reminds me of the places where I have lived. Check out this amazing laser cut box with different cities! 

1. PLANNING:

The first step in this process was to find an online “box maker” that could create a file for me based on the requested dimensions, in my case I was going to make a 4x4x4”. This method saves a lot of time as it eliminates the need to draw an entire box layout in a CAD software. I used this website, which was great as it allowed me to input something called “kerf”, which is the amount of wood that the laser cutter removes when it is making a cut. While at first sight this may not seem very relevant, it becomes important to know the kerf when you are trying to fit two pieces of wood together like a puzzle. When you input the kerf to a box maker software it will adjust the edges of the box so that they fit exactly.

To determine the kerf that I wanted I laser cut a number of rectangles next to each other inside of a box, Figure 1. After the rectangles were cut out, I squeezed them together to one edge which led to the appearance of a little gap. This gap divided by the number of lines that were cut out will give you your kerf. I measure the kerf to be 0.008 inch.

Figure 1: Kerf test

Then, I downloaded the pdf and opened it with Adobe Illustrator to edit it. Taking into account the Top and the bottom of the box, I search the different icons that I wanted to engrave. This was a really time consuming process as I couldn’t find for free all the city skylines that I wanted. Therefore I decided to do 2 city skylines and 2 activities related to the other two cities, Figure 2.

Figure 2: Box design

2. PRINTING & ASSEMBLING:

Once my box was ready I went to the computer that is in the laser cut room and changed the settings of the router 0.001in for the vector and 0.005in for engraving, then I clicked print. Here I had a little issue because the vector tab for setting up the power and frequency of printing was not showing it. After 10 mins of troubleshooting it turned out that the image of the dogs with the sled was broken. I had to look for a different image right on that computer. Once everything was all set I set the following parameters:

• For Engraving: 600 frequency, 100 speed and 70 power
• For Vectoring: 15 speed (which made the edges darker), 100 power and 10 frequency.

It took 15 mins to print, and et voila, the different parts and the box assembled (which was a scary process as it seemed like the box was going to break) in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Individual box parts and box assembled

3. COST ANALYSIS :

• The amount of plywood I used is approx. $3.
• I spent around 5 hours x20$/h = $103 making this box. Most of the time because I could find the correct icons or because of technical issues like the computer shutting down randomly.
• If I had had all the icons ready it would have been around 1 hour total so $20.