Hey! It’s Amelia, back again with another box! This time, entirely laser cut and held together by finger joints. 

Despite having some experience with the laser cutter from ENGI 120 and the previous project, I decided to choose the beginner assignment for this project to try to have a lighter workload than the box homework. Little did I know that while it seemed simple, I would still face some obstacles….

 

Attempt 1: 

Mina and I scheduled an early slot to complete the homework, hoping to not have to do any last minute work this time. Everything started off well – we made an ai file to test the kerf, selected a piece of wood, and set up the laser cutter to cut. We started off with the default ¼” wood cut settings (18 speed, 100 power, 10 frequency), and ran the kerf test. In the middle of the cut, the laser mysteriously stopped going all the way through the wood, and engraved instead. It also looked like the laser was splitting and making two lines in some areas. We re-focused the laser, double checked the file, and ran it again with no luck. After checking the OEDK troubleshooting resources, we couldn’t find a solution and decided to stop to avoid causing potential damage.

 

Attempt 2: 

Once we got news that the laser cutter was working again, we returned to the OEDK to attempt to finally complete our homework. We were able to get the kerf test to work, and after fine-tuning the power, speed, and frequency settings, we calculated a kerf of 0.0058. 

We then put this info into makercase.com, set our box dimensions to 5” x 5” x 5”, and set the finger joint size to roughly 0.5”. To make sure that the kerf was correct, we cut two pieces to see if they fit together.

The fit was right, so we started to customize our boxes. In hindsight, here’s where I made my first mistake. I selected various images to engrave on my box, rather than more simple designs. I didn’t realize that the engraves I planned to do require a lot more fine tuning with the settings to get a good result. 

Before we started cutting, we covered our wood in tape to prevent burn marks from the cuts to show up on the wood. However, once we started the engraving, we realized that engraving over tape doesn’t work great – some places wouldn’t cut through at all, and other areas had tape burned into the images. After running the box with the fully taped wood, we were out of time for the slot we signed up for, so we decided to come back the next day.

Attempt 3:

Third time’s the charm! Sort of… 

With our ai files ready, all we had to do was figure out how to tape the wood so that the cuts didn’t make burn marks and the engraving actually showed up. We decided to run the engraving first, then put tape where the cuts were going to happen. This worked pretty well, except when a piece of tape caught on fire and we had to turn off the laser. Additionally, while I was watching my images get engraved, I realized that they weren’t coming out super clearly. In the future, I’d definitely do a few tests beforehand to make sure that everything looked good. However, with the assignment due in less than 24 hours and  a backlog of my classmates needing to use the laser cutter, there wasn’t time. Ideally, I should have chosen things to put on my box that were a little more forgiving. I also noticed that some of the images were a little darker/lighter, so I think if I had more time I might have messed with them in ai a bit to get a more uniform look.

Takeaways:

• Nothing is ever as simple as it seems 
• TEST TEST TEST before making a final cut
• Think more about how the laser cutter works when deciding what to engrave, it definitely does better with some things rather than others

 Cost

• half a sheet of OEDK supplied 1/4″ wood: $5
• 6 hours of labor at $17.50/hr (avg pay for a laser cutter operator): $105
• Total: $110