Laser cutters are groovy. I haven’t worked much with them in the past but the precision and relative ease of use made laser cutting my press fit box pretty fun. I used the Epilog Fusion M2 – 40 x 28″

I started with a small .25″ x .25″ square cut to make sure my settings were correct. I started with 42 speed, 100 power, 10 frequency, 4 cycles for vector cutting. This did not go all the way through so in subsequent cuts I lowered the speed to 38 and that worked a charm.

Using those settings, I cut out a kerf box to measure the kerf of the laser. After pushing all of the pieces together in the box, I measured .0675 on the calipers, and divided by 10 to get a kerf of 0.00675. (correct measurement not pictured).

With the kerf known, I plugged it into the box-maker software along with the the thickness of the wood. This generated the svg file for the press fit box.

With the .ai file sorted, I uploaded the vector cut job to the laser cutter. I first tried a dry run with the engraving and the vector cut both uploaded, but I didn’t like the look of the dry run. In retrospect there was nothing wrong with it but I was stressed about the time constraints on my reservation so I decided to get the vector cut done first.

After verifying that the cut went all the way through, I left the wood in the same place and uploaded the engraving file. This ended up running smoothly.

With all the pieces cut out, I used the rubber back of a hex driver to hammer the pieces together. Overall, I’m super pleased with how it turned out as the joints feel smooth to the touch.

My cleaned workspace: