Introduction

The goal of this project was to cut and engrave a box using the laser cutter. I chose to make a box without a top that could hold all of my previous projects Ive worked on over the course of this class. I chose to do this as I was comfortable with using the laser cutter and 2d drawing but I wanted to push beyond my current limits and challenge myself. I made a spot for my 3D printed pieces, my CNC Noun, my pawn chess piece, my casted fingers, and my soon to be water jet diamond. I modified the given sizes for the sizes of each of the mini boxes as I knew some of my pieces were smaller or bigger. For example my chess pieces, as they are pawns, were a lot smaller than the given space for a chess piece.

2D Drawing

I organized all of the mini boxes for each of my pieces into one larger square box using Adobe Illustrator. I used makeabox.io to make the large outline of my box. I then deleted the give top piece as my box does not need a top. See the dimensions I used in the photo below. I chose to use a kerf of 0.01 after a few test cuts. I chose a tab width of 1 inch as my box was slightly larger and I wanted the tabs to be strong enough. The 2D drawing part of this assignment was very challenging. Once I had the larger box layout from the pdf the make a box website gave me, I had to one by one make the compartments for my pieces. The most difficult part was aligning the tabs from one segment with holes in another segment. I chose to add engravings on the inside of the box so they could act as labels (both in words and in pictures). I found all of the images using Noun Project. Once I had finished making the Adobe Illustrator document, I sent it over to the laser cutter.

Laser Cutting

Put masking tape over the wood so there would not be any burn scars.

Used same settings for all cuts. 100 power, 3 speed, 10 frequency for vector cut and 100 power, 50 speed, 600 DPI for raster engraving.

1st Cut – Cut everything out, kerf estimate worked well, looked good, but the majority of the tab slots on the outer walls of the box did not align with the tabs of the inner pieces of the box. Did not engrave for this cut. Went back to Adobe Illustrator to fix alignment issues.

2nd Cut – This is the cut that I used. Engraving worked really well and looks really good. Put tape on after engraving had occurred. Had problems with the wood. Used the same vector cut setting except had to cut multiple times for the pieces to come out. Some of the pieces came out a little rough around the edges and there were a few burn marks as I removed the tape before recutting the same piece of wood. All of the pieces were aligned except for one. The misalignment was not an issue as the piece was already connected within the box at three other locations. Fixed the misalignment issue by cutting off the tabs on one side of the inner wall with a hand saw so that it was flush against the inner part of the outer wall.

Conclusion

I think my box turned out well and it will be useful for storing my other completed ENGI 210 projects. However, there are still a few things I would change or do better. One, if I had more time I would have recut my whole box again with a better piece of wood. Two, I think it might have been pretty cool to engrave images on the outside of the box as well.

Cost Analysis

2 wood pieces – $5 each = $10

Masking tape = $4.30

Labor cost – 4 hours 2d drawing + 1 hour printing – 5 hours (at $10 an hour) = $50

Total Cost = $64.30