This assignment is laser-cutting a box and assembly. I chose a wood board with 0.2-inch thickness and make sure it’s flat enough.

And I went to Makercase website to generate a SVG file for six faces of a box. As required, the width, height and depth are all 4-in as outside dimensions. Material thickness I measured with caliper is 0.197 in, but I rounded up to 0.2-in to have little tolerance. Finger size I chose is 0.8 to have equally 5 fingers at each edge. Before downloading the file, I adjusted the kerf to 0.007 based on other students’ advice in case they are too tight during assembly.

As downloading the SVG file and open it with adobe illustrator. I googled a few PNG images of rice logo, cat and dog, and converted it all of time to SVG format at pngtosvg website. As opening all the downloaded patterns for engraving, I added all of them on the box file and adjust their dimensions and positions.

To differentiate the cutting and engraving, I set the stroke of box as 0.001-inch and patterns (including text) as 0.003inch. I got started to print them out with laser cutting machine till all the parameters are all set. I turned the fan on and auto-focus the laser beam to the wood board, which was fixed with a few weights at corners.

At the first time, I set the speed of cutting as 22s, but it seems like little fast since the cut seems not to go through the board. I have to re-do it and set speed of vector to 20s. This time is much better with just little connection at the edges. I didn’t want my box to crack, so I use ultrasonic blade to cut the joints a little to take the box out of the board entirely.  As I assembled the box, I felt it’s still little tight to assemble with hands. I grabbed a hammer to help me put finger joints together. So, it fits very well.

My experience laser cutting a wooden box was a journey of creativity and precision. It’s definitely useful to make some decor made of wood or acrylic.

Cost calculation:

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	1×4 Board	$0.91/sqft	Lowe’s	2 sqft	$1.82
Labor	Woodworking Operator	$24	indeed	1 h	$24
	Prototyping Engineer (You!)	$38	ZipRecruiter	1 h	$38
Overhead	Facility Cost (laser cutter)	$20	Xometry	2h	$40
	Quality Control	$41	ZipRecuiter	0.5h	$20.5
Design	Engineering and Development	$0	N/A	N/A	$0
	Iterations	N/A	N/A	N/A	$0
Misc.	Waste and Scrap	$21.58/piece	Woodpecker’s craft	0.5 piece	$10.79
Total					$135.11