For my second homework, I laser cut the six faces of a box and etched my name and college crest on two of the faces. Although I had seen the laser cutter work in past projects, I had never been the one to set it up or tinker with the settings, so this was my first time using it individually. I realized that using the laser cutter is so much easier than I thought and overall I had a really fun time testing it out and learning this new prototyping machine!
To start my box, I went to the Makercase website to download my box file. At first, when I was trying to download the file, I didn’t realize that you could set custom widths of your wood, so I was downloading templates of wood that were 1/8″ thick since the thickness of my wood fell in the middle of 1/8″ and 1/4″. This minor mistake caused some problems later down the road (discussed later). I had calculated my kerf value during the laser cutting training using the method of cutting out 9 rectangles and pushing all of them to one side. From this, I found that the gap measured 0.104 inches, so my kerf value was 0.0104. After I downloaded the correct template, I opened the file on Adobe Illustrator and changed the stroke size, and deleted the “front, back, right, left, top, and bottom” text.
Figure 1: Screenshot of Box Template Settings
Another big challenge that I went through was using the Adobe Illustrator software. I had done a few things with Illustrator before, but I was not very proficient with it. Playing around with the settings and how to move things around took some time to get used to, but eventually, I figured things out. After adding text to one of the sides and a picture of my college crest, I placed the wood in the laser cutter and started the cut.
After it finished cutting (5s, 100p, 10f for vector cutting and 100p 45s for engraving), I tried to put the pieces together but I wasn’t able to no matter how hard I pushed. At first I thought maybe my kerf was too large, but after inspecting it, I noticed the cuts into the wood were not deep enough and didn’t match the thickness of the wood. I realized it was because I had set the wood thickness of my box to 1/8″. I went back on the Makercase website to change the thickness to the correct value (0.2 inches) and then repeated the process of adding text and the Duncan crest. After printing this time, the pieces were much better and clicked into each other with ease.
Figure 2: Wood Slab with 2 Sets of Pieces Cut
Figure 3: Finished Box with Engraved College Crest Shown
Figure 4: Finished Box with Engraved Text Shown
One thing that I would have done differently is I forgot to use painter’s tape to cover the wood so that no laser burn would be shown. Overall, not much laser burn can be seen on my box, but to completely avoid the possibility of laser burn, I should have added some tape. All in all, I learned a lot working on this homework and had a lot of fun playing around with the laser cutter.
Cost Breakdown:
Wood: $5
Labor: $10/hr
Renting Laser Cutter: $25/hr
Total: $40
