When I saw the laser cut boxes from previous semesters, I thought they looked really cool and knew I wanted my box to have some sort of function so that I could use and display my (hopefully also cool-looking) box at my house or on my desk at work. So I decided to make my box a pencil/pen cup. To engrave on the 4 sides of the pencil cup, I decided to choose my favorite NASA logos. Logos below: The “worm,” the “meatball,” the NASA seal, and the Artemis logo.

 

I used the https://en.makercase.com/ tool to create a 5”x5”x5” cube with finger joints using the measured thickness from my stock piece of wood. The image below shows the progress of creating my box. First, in illustrator, I imported my box template and then added the NASA logo images, text to label my box, and a circle cut on the top panel to make the box a pencil cup. Then I printed this file using the laser cutter software. After it was cut, the finger joints were pretty tight, so I used a mallet to fit them together. They went together smoothly but are snug enough that they won’t come undone. Voila, a laser cut pencil cup!

Now, I can put this on my desk at work, fill it with pens/pencils/markers, and can choose which NASA logo I want to display each day. All 4 sides shown below.

 

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	2’x2’x1/4” plywood	$7.28/piece	Home Depot	1	$7.28
Labor	Laser Cutter Operator	$20/hr	Zip Recruiter	1.5hr	$30
	Prototyping Engineer	$38/hr	Ziprecruiter.com	1hr	$38
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	$13/hr	Dahlstrom	30min	$7
	Quality Control	$20.56	indeed.com	.25hr	$5.14
Total					$87.42