The initial idea I had was to create a sort of folding statue using the hinges as a way to fold the sides to a perpendicular.

Here it is in the laser cutter

For some reason my hinges keep deteriorating in the laser cutting process.  I actually printed out 3 prototypes and each one had its own specific failures.  The first I used wood that was significantly stronger than the box I made below, which of course I didn’t realize until I had cut it once.  It did not cut all the way through so I proceeded to cut it a second time… again it did not cut all the way through, so on the third time it finally cut all the way but of course my hinges were basically ash at this point and had very little flexibility and broke.  The second prototype I used the same wood I used for my box, and thus had a much better understanding of what settings to use, it did cut on the first try and seemed to be relatively perfect… until I removed it from the wood.  One of the hinges was already broken before I even removed it from the cut out.  And finally the third prototype which is the one above I cut before class in an attempt to have a usable design, but yet again one of the hinges broke as I was removing it from the cut.  I have decided I no longer like hinges. If I do re-create this I will use 2-d hinges or I will scale up the size of the hinges I have on here so that they are less likely to snap before I even get to see if my concept will work.

heres a box I made for training with my vinyl cut sticker etched onto it.