For this project, I worked with Anjitha! I am pretty glad we had to do this assignment in pairs because I felt less pressured. It was a little inconvenient to have one laser cutter split amongst dozens of students but it somehow worked out.
Anjitha and I spent about 5 hours on our boxes. For the first sessions, we were the first individuals to try it on our own after the laser cutter training. The pieces of wood we were to use weren’t even available yet so we used this time to practice. We followed the laminated instructions near the laser cutting and made some cuts and etches on scrap wood in the room.
The pieces for our small trial box
We even completed a full small version of the box using the make a box website. The kerf wasn’t correct so our fingers didn’t fit tightly but this two hour session altogether gave us a good understanding of what we needed to do for the assignment.
Anjitha measuring the width of our scrap wood
Some important things I learned during this assignment:
- always measure the thickness of the wood
- try your best to get the best kerf value of the machine
- more complex etchings into the wood will take a longer time
- how to navigate illustrator
assembling the box for my final box
Trial one specifications and details
I personally would’ve liked to, if I had time, I would like to stain the box with oil and sand certain parts. Maybe I will for the midterm.
This is the setup for laser cutting with the tape over to avoid burn marks
I put the Rice logo and the BU logo along with the required semester information. If I used this BU logo, it would’ve taken about over 20 minutes to for the job to finish. So I didn’t end up choosing it sadly 🙁 My final box took about 13 minutes to complete.
Side of my box after the tape is removed
Cost Analysis
Wood ~ $ 50 dollars
[total amount used 64 cubic inches]
Labor ~ 5 hrs x $7.25 = $36.25
