This project was one of my first times using a laser cutter, so I learned a lot while making my box. There was a lot of trial and error involved, but I am very familiar with the tool now and am ready to use it more in the future!

I decided to start by figuring out what I wanted to put on my box. I knew I wanted to try to put a few of the iconic buildings at Rice on the sides, but I am really indecisive, so I ended up building a four little scenes (one for each side besides the top and bottom) so I could include most of my favorites. I kind of struggled to figure out how best to depict them, because I wanted to try to use SVG files so I could get clean lines, but obviously didn’t want to have to draw the buildings from scratch to get them. However, I kind of found the holy grail of Rice building SVGs in the form of the Rice Admissions virtual map, which has SVGs of all of Rice’s major landmarks. I pieced together some of my favorite buildings, threw in some squirrels for good measure, and I had my sides done. I spent embarrassingly long going down this rabbit hole, so that’s why so much of this blog is devoted to it. After all that, it was time to get to all of the actual box making.

To get the base box file, I measured that my plywood board was 0.201in thick using a caliper, and put this number into Makercase along with my target dimensions of 4x4x4in. Now, I needed to figure out my kerf. I started with a value of 0.004in, and cut one corner to test the fit of the finger joints. With this kerf, speed 25%, and power 100% on the Epilog Pro laser cutter, this test cut fit quite well, so I decided to go ahead with cutting a full box. I laid down a bunch of tape over my cut area and started the cut.

Unfortunately, after cutting the whole box, I discovered that the cuts for the box pieces were not quite the same as my test, so the pieces fit much tighter than I liked, and some of the outer cuts for the side panels didn’t even go all the way through. I’m still not totally sure why this happened, because I tried to keep all conditions the same between the test and actual cut (like using tape on my test pieces). If I had to guess, I think it might have had something to do with the board being quite warped, to the point where I couldn’t get it totally flat, even with all four weights.

I tried out some more test pieces, eventually settling on a speed of 23% with a kerf of 0.0032in. My test piece with these settings went together well, but still had a slightly loose fit, which I wanted because I was expecting the actual cut to be a bit tighter than the test like it was the first time. After cutting these pieces out, my final box went together much better than the first time, but it wasn’t ideal. The cuts were still a bit too loose, so the left and right side pieces tended to occasionally fall out on their own. I considered keeping this as my final box in spite of the loose fit, but I wasn’t happy with it, so I decided to try one more time.

For my final box, I used 22% speed and a kerf of 0.0038in. Once this was cut, I tested assembling it before engraving, since my design took a while. The sides of this box fit together really well, and I was determined that this box would be my final one. Before engraving, I sanded the faces of the sides going up to 320 grit sandpaper so my box would just feel a bit more finished and smooth. I’m not sure if it’s best to sand before or after engraving, but I was worried about dust getting into the engraved lines, so I decided to do it before, and this it worked pretty well. To engrave my design, I put the sides back into the holes they were cut from, and set the origin at the same point in the laser cutter software.

I did it this way because I found that positioning using camera wasn’t totally accurate (actual cut would be slightly offset from position selected in software). To be totally sure that my engraving would be in the right place, I used the trace function before cutting.

video: using trace feature before cut to double check alignment

Once I was happy with the alignment, I engraved my design at 60% speed and 50% power. After experimenting with different engraving settings, I found that I got the best results doing two passes of the same engraving so the lines would be slightly darker, but not too deep or charred.

My engraving also took a while, and while skimming through the Epilog Pro manual to figure out the trace function, I saw that it is faster to keep engraved designs in one horizontal line, so I did this whenever possible. However, by the third box, this wasn’t always possible as I was trying to also work around blemishes in the wood. Putting the engraved sides in a 1×4 grid instead of a 2×2 grid took the time for one pass from ~8 minutes to ~6 minutes, which is a pretty good improvement. After two engraving passes, I was ready to assemble my box for the final time. Even though it took a lot of trial and error, I am very happy with my final result! Below are pictures of all four sides.

For the cost estimate of this box, I chose to include only the time I spent testing the kerf for the final time and making the final box, as included the prior failed boxes to calculate the cost of the final one seems unreasonable.

• 1/4in plywood (~2/3 of 2x4ft sheet used): $10 (Home Depot)
• 3 hours labor @ $10/hour: $30
• masking tape: negligible
• sandpaper: negligible
• 3 hours machine time on laser cutter @ $15/hour (estimate): $45

Total: $85