Another week, another box. After two pretty labor-intensive projects, it was nice to sit back and let the machines do the work for once. It took two attempts, but I’m happy with the aesthetic of the output. Here’s how I did it:

Level 1: Test Cut and Illustrator

To initialize the laser cutter and minimize risks of cut failure, I started out with a couple of test cuts. Despite using the recommended settings for cutting wood, I noticed some burning around the test piece, so I was advised to cover the wood with painter’s tape and try again:

As seen above, the use painter’s tape significantly reduces the charring of the wood. I owe much of the cleanliness of my edges and rasters to this advice. Moving on from the test cuts, I downloaded a box from Makercase with a tab width of just over 0.5″ and a kerf of 0.007. I opted to place a LA Tech symbol on one side of the box and the assignment details on the other. After setting this up in Illustrator with the same settings as my test cut, I sent the next print to the machine and let it do its thing.

Level 2: Let the Machine do its Thing

Unfortunately, the machine did not quite do its thing optimally. The small test cuts worked, yes, but the larger pieces for the box did not cut fully through in places, as seen below. Only one piece fell out properly, and the rest had small uncut edges. After some investigation, I realized that I misread the optimal settings poster and programmed the laser speed to be 1% too fast.

 

I remedied this by leaving the stock in place and deleting all of the good cuts in Illustrator, leaving only the uncut edges behind to be traced again:

This worked, but left some unfortunate charring on the twice-cut edges. The machine also registered the cut as being over 0.5″ to the left of where I intended, causing the edge of the tabs to run up against the edge of the stock and getting cut short. This can be seen in the final product below:

Ultimately, I decided I wasn’t happy with this box, and wanted to give it another attempt from scratch. I revisited the laser cutter and tried again.

Level 3: Let the Machine do its Thing, but Better

This time, I started off with all of the correct settings, and opted to make the box cooler. Rather than putting the LA Tech logo on one side of the box, I let myself nerd out and try etching every side of the box. I tried etching the house crests from Game of Thrones, but the color gradients in the images did not translate well to laser cutting, and I ended up with what looked mostly like plain brown shields. I eventually settled on using the Knights Radiant glyphs from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives, which engraved nicely due to their uniformity. To ensure all of the glyphs had the same depth and shade, I imported them into MS Paint and filled them all black:

By implementing the lessons I learned from my previous mistakes, this cut came out nicely. The only issue I had was that the tabs fit perhaps too tightly, and I had to basically hammer the box together with a mallet. This caused some slight splintering of the wood in places, but I’m very happy with the uniform look of the final product:

Cost Estimate

~15″x10″ wood at $0.12/sq.in: $18.74
~0.5 hours labor at $15/hr: $7.50

Total: $26.24