This week, I worked on creating a wooden box with a laser cutter. I have some experience with the laser cutter, but never to the extent that this project is. I have been wanting to create things through laser cutting, so I was very excited for this topic.

I started with a tutorial session with a TA so that I could walk through the steps with someone who knows what they are doing.

I first created a nameplate drawing in Adobe Illustrator. (See Below)

I then uploaded it to the PCs in the laser cutting lab. I had some scaling issues when uploading it though because it downloaded way bigger than it was supposed to be. After some readjusting though, we were able to scale the drawing to the right dimensions.

I printed my nameplate on the Fusion M2 laser cutter and set it to its standard settings tested by the TAs, which were 38S, 100P, 50F, and four cycles to vector cut. For the engravings the settings were 100S, 100P, 600DPI.

I then cut my nameplate! It did not have any flame, but it cut mostly through with a few sharp edges that I needed to sand down.

I then uploaded the file into illustrator and grouped four of the squares together and then two of the squares I copy and pasted to a separate file. I did this so that I could print only two squares at first to make sure that they would piece together properly. I then had two files one with four of the squares and one with two of the squares. I also added my name information and college crest on two of the squares in the four-square file.

On the second attempt I increased the power to 38 and tried it again. It was more successful, but still difficult to pop the squares out. I put the pieces together to see if they would fit and they did!

I did notice though that they seemed smaller than 4″. I measured the squares and they were smaller than they were supposed to be. I think their scale was messed up when I imported it from Makercase to Adobe Illustrator. On the third attempt, I fixed the scale of the squares making sure that they were 4″ x4″ and I increased the power to 40. Finally, I was able to print all the pieces of the box and assemble them!

The engraving of McMurtry Crest became a little covered which I think is another result of the uploading process. It was not shaded like that in Adobe when I was creating it, but when I uploaded it to the laser cutting computer, I think it scaled weird making the X in the center a thicker line.