laser cut homework-1f6h3ul – file found here

This box has an 8 year history.

Some things never change.

And by things I mean my sense of humor, it has not improved at all.

I took a photoshop class during high school and we had an assignment to vectorize a raster image so I turned this cougar into an awesome meme. I figured out live trace about two days into the assignment so while everyone else spent two weeks drawing, I spent two weeks memeing, this is what I came up with.Pretty neat

Moving on, I wanted to set my box up using this image, so I laser etched it into my box! Fun! I started the box project trying to do the advanced version, but I gave up when I started to have to take the kerf into account and settled for the beginner version. I used MakeABox.io to produce my schematics, using a kerf of 0.01 inches, which provided for a great snug fit for my box when I put it together. I employed tape to keep some of the edges from burning, and that was successful, although some edges were burnt anyway. For some reason one panel did not cut out all the way, and I broke it trying to remove it, so I was forced to make it again to make a viable five-sided box. Once the box was snapped together, I used the orbital sander to remove all the burn marks and soften the sides to make it more handle-able, although I wish I had removed the teeth from the tops. I also did not plan on having the photo on the bottom… whoops. Here is the box.

 

During the last week I also used my new laser cutting skills to help out with my photography class, where I created this photogram using laser cut pieces and a LOT of time.

My box took about 3 hours to complete, so that’s $120, plus materials at $10 and laser cutting time at $25, this box was in total $155, assuming I had access to a free vector-based software.