Hi everyone! This go ’round of making a box was much better than my last attempt (please refer to my last post or else that statement and this title will not make sense). This project wouldn’t have been a Delatte project if it didn’t start with a little chaos, but everything worked out in the end.

When testing cuts and initially trying parameters we knew worked with past samples of wood, we ran into a bit of a pickle and needed to consult help. We had very low power and frequency settings, and a decent speed set, but the laser was burning our test wood badly. Badly as in we stopped after a few seconds because the wood was catching fire. We did some troubleshooting, and a friend was able to help us locate the problem: our focus. We hadn’t seen the base of the laser cutter move itself out of focus in between cuts, and it was causing our wood to burn very very badly and not cut all the way through. We pretty quickly resolved the issue, and kept going. Also, pretty please ignore the fact that the “O” on our Hello was cut off… Thanks

After doing a kerf test on another test piece of wood and consulting with other prototypers, I decided to go with a kerf thickness near 0.005in. Originally our kerf test gave us a number closer to .007, but we cut two sides of a small box and found that we needed to alter it a bit lower. I began using a box template from MakerCase – where I input my desired (required) dimensions and finger size. I didn’t use an exact finger size, but I just chose a size that gave me the number of fingers that I thought both looked and would hold together the best. I exported this file into Adobe Illustrator, then began looking for fun nouns to engrave!

I, naturally, scoured the internet for a svg file or image that looked as close to my dog as possible but settled on a cute little puppy with a heart on it’s chest.

My attempt at finding a Louisiana Tech Bulldog svg file was also more effort than I was willing to fight for, so I settled for making my own cute little bulldog with LaTech below it to represent my undergrad college. I love the Owls and all, but it will always be go Dawgs for me! But, being the good student I am, I also included a Rice symbol.

The first Rice symbol I chose was a jpeg image that we tried to convert to svg, but our attempts must have failed because it caused a lot of problems when transferring the total design over to the Epilog program from AI. So, I chose to just stick with a Rice image saved on the computer that we knew would work properly.

Overall, the process of cutting the box out was pretty smooth. There was an imperfect spot in the board I was cutting on close to my little puppy etch, and PTSD did set in when the laser went over that part and started a large amount of sparking/ fire – but it was over quick and it didn’t burn my edges any worse (better?) than anywhere else on my box!

000–>                              AHH –>

Anyways, it was fun and once again I am so glad to have friends and classmates to help!

Material	Cost	Amount	Quantity Needed	Total Cost
1/4″ Wooden Sheet	$12.98	1	1	$12.98
Facilities	$250	1 Month	2 hrs	$0.70
Prototyping Engineer	$38	1 hr	1 hr	$38
Laser Operator	$20	1 hr	1 hr	$20
Quality Control	$41	1 hr	1 hr	$41
Total Cost				$112.68