I’d first like to say that the only reason I chose that title was because of the pun.

Welcome to my blog post about my laser-cut box!

I made two boxes over the past two weeks, because my first attempt did not fit snuggly without glue. But I will walk through the process for the first one first, and then note any changes for the second iteration.

For this project, I decided to make a cubic box with internal dimensions of 4.1 inches. To make my box, I used makeabox.io, and then added decals in Illustrator. The wood I planned to use was 5 mm thick. I settled on a Mario theme for the box, so I added question marks on all of the sides to mimic the blocks in Super Mario Bros.

With my illustrator file finished, I was ready to set up the laser cutter.

On my first cut, I used 45% raster speed at 100% power, and 6% vector speed at 100% power and 10% frequency.

I was now ready to cut the piece. After placing a piece of wood in the laser cutter, focusing the laser, and jogging the axes, I started my cut.

The cut came out clean (except for a small patch where it didn’t cut all of the way), with little burning/charring. However, the pieces did fit somewhat loosely, loose enough that I had to glue them together for the box to be handled. So, I added a few dabs of wood glue and let that dry (with some clamps).

I soon checked the assignment again to find out that I needed to produce a box that didn’t need glue to stay together tightly, something that I had forgotten before. Sadly, this wasn’t until after I had finished gluing and even adding oil to my first box.

Now, I went back to experiment with making a better fitting box. To change the tightness of the fits, I adjusted the kerf accounted for in the make-a-box program. With a larger kerf, the program exaggerated the tab sizes to account for material loss. I tested 4 new kerf settings with mini boxes to see what had the best fit, and settled on a kerf of .0075 in.

With this new setting, I recreated my original box, except this time I added an 8-bit Mario on the blank side of the box. Additionally, I cut at 5% speed this time to make sure it cut all of the way through at all points.

This box fit very well without any aids, but there was one crucial error on the label, so I had to re-cut one side

After that re-cut, I assembled my box and added some cutting board oil to create the beauty pictured below.

 

 

Reflection:

I learned a ton about how kerf width affects a laser cut in this lab. Additionally, from experimenting with different speeds, I learned that even small differences in speed greatly affect how well the cut turns out. I also learned that I should read instructions more carefully.