Hi everyone. I tried making my box twice, and had two different types of experiences that I believe have something to do with the type of wood we used. In my first attempt I used the ten box method in the home work to determine the kerf value for my material. I used the suggested vector cut parameters on the board, 18-25 power and 100 speed. Overall, this provided a nice clean cut where the rectangles can be seen below. To determine the kerf, I pushed all the rectangles back and measured the gap between the 10th rectangle and the edge of the inner rectangle with calipers. I determined a gap of 0.03425 inches. However, since there were ten rectangles, I had to divide this number by 10 in order to determine my Kerf of 0.003425 inches.  After discussing with others, I tried using a Kerf value of 0.335, just to be safe and not avoid a harsh tight fit.

After determining my kerf value I determine the thickness of the wood I used went into the box maker software and used the caliper to determine the  thickness of the wood~1/4″.  However, before I could put my quickly print out my box after adding the png files t my adobe illustrator using, I ran into issues with the printers. For some reason which I did not understand, the printer was burning through the wood. The only thing that was on the wood was the red laser-no heat was applied. To compensate for this, I took the time to autofocus the printer every time I performed a cut or moved something in the printer.

 

My first attempt to print out my box was not as successful as I hoped. For the engravings, I chose to go with something light and not to dark and chose a speed of 90% and a power of 40%. I made the silly mistake of selecting only engrave during my first cut. The engraved features on my box are nice, however, they were shortly ruined when I had to do the vector cut over them. I tired my best to center them on the software, but the cut occurred 1/4″ lower than expected. This can be seen in the basset hound engraving and the engraving with the Indian and Pakistani flags. Because of this, some of the engravings are not as centered as I would have like.  However, the kerf that I set the box to did work successful and my box from a structural point of view was a success.

Attempt 2:

For my second attempt, I want to try re-centering my engravings to make everything look prettier. I also want to try a new and higher kerf value to attain tighter fit. Furthermore, since there were no more pieces of scarp wood I could use, I started using a fresh sheet of plywood. To determine the kerf faster,  I cut out a 2 inch by 2 inch piece of ply wood, and determined its width, subtracted the difference by 2, and divided by two – essentially determining the lost width per a side. This provided me with a kerf of 0.0037″.

The biggest problem that came up was the fact that the determining the proper vector settings for cutting out he plywood. Despite the fact that I was using the suggested setting, my I was not able to cutout anything successfully setting for the ply food. To compensate for this, I made multiple square, with multiple parameters, until on finally cutout. Finally, it was determined that doubling the frequency from 10 to 20 produced a cut.

 

The kerf provided my box with a tight fit, however, due to the difficulties in determining the parameters to cut the plywood out,  imperfections with he wood were caused when I had to push the wood cutouts from the plywood-as seen below.

Overall, because my first attempt had less burn marks and looked cleaner, I decided to turn. If I could change on thing about it, I would make the kerf in between 0.0037 “and 0.0033”, since one is too tight and he other a little loose.

 

 

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	¼” plywood Board	$29	Home Depot	2	$58
Labor	Laser Cutting Operator	$24/hr	Salary.com	4 hours	$96
	Prototyping Engineer (You!)	$54/hr	Zippa	4 hours	$216
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	$12.73/hr	alphalazer	4 hours	$50.92
	Quality Control
Total.					$420.92