Laser Cut Box! | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

Hellooooooooo

Today, I was tasked to create a wooden, laser cut box, that stays together using NO glue or adhesives. How might this be done? Using finger joints that fit perfectly together!

Step 1) I went to the laser cutter and did a test box on my material with the settings given by the TA’s, and it worked perfectly! Laser Cut a kerf box using a .ai file that was given. This is to test how much material the laser cutter takes off so we can account for that when we want the pieces to perfectly line up together. After cutting it out, moving all the pieces to one side and measuring the remaining space and dividing by 10, I got my individual kerf to be 0.0043″.

Step 2) Go into en.makercase.com to create a 4″ x 4″ x 4″ box and input the kerf value. I then opened the file in Adobe illustrator to add my info, college crest, and 2 cute images on different sides.

Step 3) Not wanting to attempt cutting all 6 sides, in the case something was off, I cut two sides with images engraved on them. The engravings went perfect, however, they were no where near fully cut out… I then realized that I forgot to copy and paste the vector cut 4 times, and the wood had already shifted so I wasn’t able to cut in the exact same spot.

Step 3) So I moved onto just cutting out the top and bottom pieces with no engravings on them, and they worked perfectly! And I decided to cut the rest of the sides. Once cut, I checked on them and all the engravings were perfect, however, only 2 of the 4 fully cut through, 1 was halfway cut, and 1 had the cut line engraved (something when wrong and the stroke was not set properly…). After taking the 2 that did work, I recut the final two – one cut out fully and one needed slight force – but finally all my pieces were cut out! After many trial and errors.