Bringing it Back Within… a Beginner’s Beget

Over this past week, myself and my partner (Lindsey Russ) have been working at the OEDK Laser Cutting Room creating a laser-cut, decaled box! As we chose the Beginner’s difficulty, this project required less drafting and development as our previous projects, but still the same level of craftsmanship and commitment. With this in mind, we started our construction…

Placid Planning & Drafting

Utilizing the given website makercase, we inputted our parameters for our box. We set the box to be 4″x4″x4″ and for the thickness of the wood to be 1/4″ thick. Furthermore, we set the edge joints to be finger joints so as to have the box be press-fit together. However, to achieve this we had to set the Kerf of our plan to be correct so as to account for the width of the laser when it cut. To do so, we set the Kerf to be 0.007″ (The lasercutter’s width) and downloaded our file to be cut.

After putting our file into Adobe Illustrator, we began adding the decal designs to our box. To do so, we uploaded vector files of the Lovett and Wiess Residential College Crest and positioned them within the constraints of the box. Furthermore, we added our names and the class information to differentiate our project from our peers. Both the Crests and information were intentionally positioned so as to allow for all three components to be seen from an isometric view of the front of the box! Finally, we colored the cut edge lines of the file to be red and the decals to black as the Epilog software recognizes both respectively as a Vector Cut & Raster.

With the box’s design now finalized and ready to cut, we moved towards calibrating the Laser Cutter machine. After jogging the laser head to an open space on the wood & setting the correct height for the laser focus, we cut the piece. Using the given OEDK wood cutting settings (5 Speed, 100 Power, 10 frequency), our piece was cut/decalled after ~4 minutes. While some edges were a little burnt past the edge, the piece overall was correctly made and no burn took away from the overall aesthetic of the box!

Removing the pieces was mostly easy as the laser correctly pierced the wood and was capable of having them “fall” when the wood base was removed. There was some difficulty, however, on the top pieces as they were cut close enough to the edge to damage the integrity of this edge. However, they were able to be removed easily without damage to the box and moreso did not impact the final piece’s aesthetic nor the base wood’s functionality for future laser-cuts.

With all pieces finalized and removed, we moved towards the final step of the process, Assembly! Assembling the crate wasn’t too difficult, as the pieces snapped together with some force to hold in place (i.e. the kerf was set correctly for the piece). While one finger joint did fracture due to a misplacement, its notably a hairline fracture and not visible unless seen under close inspection. Putting all the pieces together, our edges lined up correctly and the piece was finished!

Refreshing Review

Room for improvement on the next Laser-Cutting project I work on:

• Setting the cut piece farther from the edge as to prevent fracturing and potential damage to the cut piece and base wood
• Rastering decals with different settings as to enhance the aesthetic of the decal
  • The Wiess Crest came out cleaner than the Lovett, which while it doesn’t diminish the look of the box, it is worth testing in the future different setting. This is to see the affect of different setting on complicated decals.
• Testing different wood types & taping methods to determine the best of either to prevent wood burning and charring along cut edges.

In spite of these, I did enjoy using the Epilog Laser Cutter and the process of laser cutting and plan on utilizing this skill/machine in my future projects and research at the OEDK!

Fair Fees

• Materials
  • 12″x8″ Cut 1/4″ Wood ($6.50/ 2 People): $3.25
• Time:
  • 1.5 hours at Texas Minimum Wage ($7.25): $10.88
• Overhead:
  • Estimate: $5

Total Cost of Laser Cut Process: $19.13

Since my last project, I tested more finishes than I did previously which did help how the end process matched aesthetically. For next time, however, I’ll test different materials with these finishes to ensure a holistically pleasing finish for the project!