Hello Everyone!

This week, I was tasked with creating a laser cut press fit box. I “discovered” the laser cutter a couple of weeks ago and have fallen in love with it ever since. I’ve been thinking of ways to use the laser cutter for all my projects and making cute boxes to store my electronics is one use I would’ve never thought of until now.

Firstly, I measured the kerf  to be 0.0008 ” on the Epilog Fusion Pro machine and found the material thickness of the plywood provided to be about 1/4″ thick.

Then I used the website makercase.com to create a template for my box. I went with a 4″ cube with finger joints, as per the assignments specifications. I then settled for 0.55″ wide tabs to ensure the joints were strong but the box wouldn’t be too difficult to assemble.

This is what my design looked like! My intention was to make it look like a die with icons having some meaning to me in some way (if you couldn’t tell the face with my name on it is the “6”). I got the icons from flaticon and converted them to vectors using the image trace function in Adobe Illustrator.

I also made sure to color different elements in different colors so that I could apply different settings to them. For example my name is higher than my information in the design hierachy, so I wanted to make it visually larger and darker than the rest, so I made it a different color and told the laser cutter to engrave it according to the settings I liked on the Power vs Speed Guage at the OEDK.

Here are the settings I used:

Yellow text: 45p 20s 600 DPI

Blue text: 100p 80s 600 DPI

Black Art : 100p 50s 600 DPI

Initially, when cutting out my name plate, I had the consistent problem of not getting the wood entirely cut through, despite using OEDK recommended settings. To compensate, I made the speed slower while cutting on the piece of wood I got for my box. However, I didn’t account for the fact that they were two different pieces of wood, with different properties. Hence, I got a little too much charring on the cut edge of my box pieces that I would have liked. In retrospect, I should have tested it out by cutting a little square to test my settings until I liked them.

Also, it seems like there was a mixup with the Lovett College Crest as the laser cutter cut rather than etched the text. My hypothesis is that there is a little red in there or the stroke size was set to 0.001 in, I’m not entirely sure, but I didn’t want to re do it because time was of the essence here and this was my second attempt in trying to cut the box. (in the first attempt the laser cutter was refusing to recognize the vector lines, for some reason going to bed and coming back the next morning seemed to fix that! )

Here are my pieces cut out!

 

Here is my box assembled!

My box came out so cute! I feel like I executed my vision and learnt how to to troubleshoot the laser cutter. If I had more time, I would stain it (in my signature light wash) and would have played more with the settings to create more “3d” effects by playing around with color and power/speed settings.

My worskpace post assembly!

 

Cost Analysis

Item Name : 1/4 inch x 24-inch x 24-inch Birch Ply

Unit Price : $9.88 (Home Depot)

Qty : 0.5

Price : $4.94

Item Name : Laser Cutter Rental

Unit Price : $1/min of job duration (Laserflair)

Qty : 10 minutes

Price : $10

Item Name : Labour

Unit Price : $15/hr

Qty : 3hrs

Price : $45

Total Costs : $59.94

Signing out,