Laser Cutting | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

During this project, I learned how to use laser cutting and made a box.

Steps:

Cover the wood with tape to decrease the burn on the wood.
Finding the kerf by creating rectangles, measuring the gap with a caliper, and dividing by 10 to determine the average kerf. Paula and I worked together to find the kerf. The gap was 0.06; we divided by 10 to get the kerf 0.006 in

3. Used digital calipers to measure the thickness of the wood, which is equal to 0.20 in

4. I used a box-making program online known as Makercase to generate the box file.

5. Import the file in Adobe Illustrator.

1. File
2. New from template → select a file
3. Move the file to the upper left corner.
4. Select a line/shape (vector/cut <= 0.001 and engrave >0.001)
5. file→ print→ set up→ preference (power 100, speed 4, and frequency 10)
6. print

6. Add the text (name, ENGI 210, semester, the date, college crest). However, as a grad student, I did not have a college crest to put

7. I added some pictures.

8. Cut the box with the laser cutter.

1. Put the wood
2. Press Jog
3. press focuses
4. job → start

9. the final step is to put the pieces together after laser cutting them.

First Box

Second Box

Improvement:

The first problem was the rectangles test. The laser cutter started to cut from outside to inside, which made the measurements incorrect. Luke helped us fix this problem by explaining that laser cut the box from the first to the last thing you drew in Adobe Illustrator. As a result, we fixed it by drawing the small rectangles first, then the outer rectangles.
Also, I had a problem when I started using the laser cutting with my name and image where I forgot to change the setting for the image only to be Raster (engrave)>=0.003.

3. I had a problem choosing Raster for some pictures because the way I downloaded the picture needed to be corrected. I changed it and saved it so that adobe illustrator could read it.

4. Next time I will put tape only where I want to cut the box. Based on Rice owl, you can see it needs to be cleaner because of the blue tape, even though I tried to clean it several times.

5. The other issue for the first box: After the laser cutting of the pieces, I mixed up the top, bottom, left, and right to connect the pieces, which made it hard when I connected them. For the second box: after laser cutting the pieces, I put the number on the back of the wood to know where each one should be when connecting them.