This week I was able to utilize told that I am familiar with—such as Adobe Illustrator software and a laser cutter—to create a personalized box. With previous experience in Illustrator, it was very easy for me to manipulate our proposed design, leaving the challenge of playing with laser cutter settings. After speaking with friends and classmates who noted that the most time-consuming part of the process was preparing the document to the printed, I came to the OEDK early to create and design the box.

Once the document was formatted, seemingly correctly, I sent our document to the OEDK laptop to be printed. We made a larger sample box to test for the effects of masking tape on the wood as we thought it would limit excess burn marks on our wood pieces. After cutting our box, we quickly realized that we would need to remove the tape before continuing as the rastoring of the letters was only etched on the tape, not the actual wood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, we attempted to cut out the pieces for our box. We quickly realized something was off when the laser cutter made a sharp turn very soon. After “completing” the first side of the box we stopped the laser cutter and had to fix our error as the side fit in the palm of my hand (lol). Because I was initially editing the document on my personal computer, I did not have the larger laser-cutting template-sized document and had readjusted the sizing of the faces to be ½ the original size.

After fixing this issue, we began printing again and everything seemed to be going smoothly until one side did not print notches. This was by far our most challenging error to fix, and it ended up being an error caused by our design passing the portion of the document that the laser cutter was printing. Following that final adjustment, we were able to laser cut the faces of our box and complete the project. 

We used a kerf of 0.005 and set regular settings for the power, speed, and frequency on the laser cutter (cut (90p, 4s) raster (40p, 40s)) to achieve our etching and cutting.

Cost of Project:

• materials
  • wood (~$25)
  • adobe illustrator software ($20/month)
• labor
  • 2 hours on laser cutter @ $20/hr
• machine time
  • laser cutter rental ~$20/hr
• total: 40+40+20+25 = ~$125