THE PROCESS

The first thing we did was pick up a piece of wood from the ENGI 210 table, and measure its thickness using a caliper.

We found the thickness of the wood to be 0.235 inches, which was very close to the 1/4 inch setting on makercase.com (0.236 in), so we good ok to proceed.

The next step was to measure the kerf of the laser, so we created a shape with 2 concentric rectangles, making 9 parallel vertical cuts in the inner one so that we could shift them all to one side after being cut, and measure the gap created.

We measured the created “kerf gap” to be 0.0595 inches, so after dividing that number by 10, we started by using a 0.006-inch kerf input on makercase.com.

We printed 2 sides (back and right) to test the connections given this kerf input, and we found that the connection was too tight. Thus, we needed to decrease the kerf input (as for makercase.com, a higher kerf input means larger finger slots, as it assumes the laser will be taking off more material). We decreased the kerf input to 0.005 inches and tested again by printing just the back and right sides. This time we found a better fit, and I proceeded to print the remaining 4 sides.

We used the following settings for vector cuts:

Frequency: 10f

Speed: 6

Power: 100

After all 6 sides were cut, I worked to slot them all together, leaving me with my finished box (pictured are the 2 sides with etching on them:

REFLECTION

When Julian and I arrived, Dante was working before us, and he mentioned that in the initial iteration of his box, he had forgotten to subtract the wood width from the box dimensions when inputting them into makercase.com, leading the finger joints to be misaligned. He emphasized the importance of that step to us, so shout out to Dante!

I used the laser cutter a fair bit in high school, with wood, acrylic, and also cardboard for lower fidelity prototyping. Still, it took Julian and me a while to test different for the correct kerf, so we ended up using pretty much the full 2-hour session.

I think that the applications of laser cutting are vast, especially once I was introduced to living hinges (which Julian and I want to use for our midterm project).

COST ESTIMATE

Raw Materials

• 1.8 square feet 1/4 inch wood = ~ $11.8 ($20/3/12″x12″)

Labor

• 2 hours = $15 ($7.50/hour)

Overhead

• Laser cutter operation (2 hours) = ~ $50 (Assuming laser cutter operation costs $25/hour)

Total Cost = $76.8

Since the majority of time was allotted to correctly determining the kerf of the laser over the 2-hours, future iterations of this process will be much more efficient, so both labor and overhead costs could likely be decreased by up to 75%.