Hi Everyone!

I will be walking you through the process of laser-cutting my box today. First, I picked out my wood, and measured its thickness with a caliper. The thickness was 0.186 inches. Next, I opened https://boxdesigner.connectionlab.org/ to design my box. I input the width of the wooden board and adjusted the fingers of the box to 0.622, which happened to be 3-4 fingers on each edge. On my first attempt, I did not change the kerf setting, but on my second attempt, I set the kerf to 0.015. (this mistake detailed later on) This generated a pdf version of my box that I edited with Inkscape. On Inkscape, I used the text tool and imported the Baker college crest to be etched onto the wood. Here is the file that I laser cut!

The settings for Epilog were the following:

vector cut setttings: 4s, 100% power, frequency 10

raster etching setting: 20 s, 20% power

When using the machine, I first turned on the laser cutter and the exhaust. Then, I focused the machine using the autofocus function on Epilog pro. This function automatically set the focus for my wood instead of having to manually focus it. I then cut out a 0.2 in x 0.2 in square as a test cut, and the cut was clean, so I decided to keep the settings for vector cutting. I then opened the file on the machine and set the vector file strokes to 0.072 for the cuts and 0.0216 for the etching. After this, I hit print for the laser cutter to do its job. The laser cutter etches first because if it were to cut first, the piece that is cut drops down and it messes up the level that is needed for etching. Here is the etched Baker crest!

Then, the laser cutter started to cut out the pieces. Here is the picture of it in action:

The above images are ones are the images of my 2nd laser cutter. I had some trouble having the fingers fit together, as I did not adjust my kerf setting before. I had it as 0.25 default setting, which led to a loose fit of the box fingers. Realizing that the box fingers have to have a tighter fit, I printed the kerf.ai file and measured the gap to be 0.169 in. Then, I calculated the kerf value to be 0.0169 by dividing this value by 10. From there, I was able to import this kerf value to the original file and redo my box.

Here is the final image of the laser cut box!

Additional further step for this project would have been cleaning up the burned marks. I think putting masking tape on the wood would have prevented the burned parts to smear onto the wood itself, which would have brought up the quality of the box even more.

After finishing the box, I cleaned up my work space, turned off the laser cutter and the exhaust.

Assuming using the laser cutter is ~$20 per hour (according to 20*1.5 hour = $30), the labor cost to be $13*1.5 hr = $19.5, cost of material (wood plank from home depot) $14.94, the total cost would be $64.44 If I were to do this again, the time it takes for me to cut would reduce significantly (around 90%), as I have now figured out the settings and how to utilize the laser cutter, and bring the price down. (20+13)*(0.15 hours) + 14.94 = $19.89.