This week I worked on designing a laser cut printed box that I could use to store my smaller projects. I have never used the laser cutter before, so this was my first experience with it. I designed a 4″x4″x4″ box in adobe illustrator with the help of Makercase, and from there it was simply figuring out how to work the laser cutter.

The first thing I did was try and find out what kerf I would need to adjust for by creating some finger joints with different kerfs to see which one I liked, as I wanted a tight fit but not tight enough that it would drive me crazy to put together the box. After about 4 test, I settles on 0.0015 in of kerf, as it gave me the flexibility yet rigidity that I was looking for.

Finally, I moved on to trying to hone in on the settings I would use to cut my box. I did this by printing out two faces of the box, one with an image and the other with none. This would let me hone in on the engraving and vector cut settings that I would use on the real deal. I settled on vector settings of 15 speed, 100 power, and 10 frequency. These settings left a bit of a burned edge around the sides which I liked, and I found that about 85% of the time it completely cut through the wood so I did not have to manually go back with a knife to free out the piece. The engraving settings were a little more difficult, as I had multiple iterations and found none that I really liked. I settled on 600 dpi, 85 speed, and 70 power. I found that while it engraved at a decent depth, I felt that it was slightly inconsistent with the engravings, which was aggravating to say the least.

My original design and the laser cut pieces are shown below:

As you can see, the failure for this project were the top and bottom panels, as I believe they were simply too light to have shown any kind of design. I think this could have been fixed with either multiple passes of the engraving, or I could have inverted the image so that there were fewer lines being engraved, which I think might have worked the best. The images as a whole seemed to be very light, and I regret not running over them a second time, however I pulled the pieces out of the laser cutter without thinking, and only later on did I realize I could have ran it again to get a deeper engraving.

If I could do this again (and I will be doing this again, I want to recut my box over the break) I would try and figure out the ideal settings for my engraving, as I believe this to be the weakest part of my design, and also invert the top and bottom images to get a more distinct engraving. I believe my vector cutting was really good, besides one pieces that needed to be sanded a small amount as it did not come out as cleanly from the piece of wood.

Cost Analysis:

Plywood: $3.50

Labor @ $12 an hour for 7 hours: $84

Total: $87.50 (this number can be brough down significantly if you had the design of the box already completed, as it only took about 36 minutes for my box to actually cut, this is only for one pass, so not including the second pass on the engraving that I am planning to do in the redo)