Emma’s Laser Cutting Box Experience!

• eyl7

Hello! Here is the process I went through to create a laser-cut box!

I first started by going to Makercase’s online box designer to create a laser-cut file for a 4x4x4 box with three finger joints for the sides. I chose this number because I felt that it would look simple and clean yet have enough friction and security to keep the box firmly together. I used the kerf of 0.013 and downloaded the file as an SVG for easy uploading into Adobe Illustrator.

I then opened the file in Adobe Illustrator and inserted my college crest and other information into the box. I made sure to make the text into an outline because during the nametag cutting, the font I had used was not available on the ODEK computer, and thus, I had to find a new font. I changed the vector lines to red to better help differentiate which lines would be engraved and which would be cut.

I then cut it on the Epilogue Pro Laser Cutter, which I had previously reserved on the Fabman website. I carefully followed the instruction sheet and test-cut a small box. I used Power 10, Speed 25, and Frequency 10 settings, and it looked pretty good! I then started to cut and engrave my actual box. My engrave settings were Power 50, Speed 100, and DPI 600.

During the cut, I found out that I accidentally placed the edges of the box off the artboard so the outermost edges did not cut. Thus I had to recut those pieces again.

 

After cutting, I tried to fit the pieces together, but they were a little too tight. The kerf was just barely not enough. So I decided to try and sand the notches to get it to fit. I used a scape piece of wood and sandpaper to make a sanding block that can comfortably fit into the notches and started sanding. 

After sanding all the notches, it was still a little tight, so I used a rubber mallet to hammer everything together, resulting in a very sturdy box. Lastly, I decided to sand down each face to take away any burn marks as well as lighten the burnt sides of each piece to match the color of my etches, which I thought looked more cohesive.

Here are images of my cleaned workspace:

Cost estimates:

Total: $94.67

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