Press-Fit Construction, 2nd Attempt

Other people needed to use the cutter, so I while I waited for it to free up again, I modified my file a bit. I changed the front and back panels to match edge to edge with the outer walls, and I also changed the assembly method to something more like meshing tabs rather than little rectangular projections which go through holes on the panels (This was necessary in order to allow me to have the walls meet up with the front and back panels).

Once my turn at the cutter came around again, I ran the file:

speed: 8

Power: 100%

Frequency: 1425 hz

This time, I had a plan to compensate for the uneven bed. I figured that since the material is higher on one side and lower on another, that I would just run the cutting operation twice, but in between the first and second operations, I would refocus the laser onto the far right side of the material.

Normally before you run the laser cutter, you calibrate it by focusing the beam on the upper-left hand corner of the material. If the beam is too high or too low, it won’t cut all the way through, and it will also cut a much wider line that it ought to. I figured I could run the job once, then refocus the beam on the far right side of the material, then run it a second time. sure, the cuts would be a bit wider than I’d like, but at least this way they ought to cut all the way through.

To save time, the only area I cut twice was the perforated strip which makes up the walls of the box.

Didn’t work. The extra pass with the laser burned too much of the wood and rendered the whole thing so brittle that it snapped as it bent. Three out of four corners were actually OK initially, but after repeated bending back and forth, only one joint (the one closest to the upper-left corner of the material) held up. Additionally, the tabs did not fit together. This was partially due to the extra charring of the wood, and partially due to the fact that I had to shrink the file down at the last minute to get it to fit on the piece of wood I was using. This shrinkage didn’t account for the thickness of the wood and threw the ratios of the tabs off. (I knew this would happen but decided to go ahead anyway because it would take a long time to fix and I mostly just wanted to test the joints anyway).

Back to the drawing board. Which in this case is still Adobe Illustrator. After another hour of tweaking I fixed the tabs so they will hopefully fit together better, and I shrunk the file size down a bit so everything would fit on one 23"x11.5" panel (not to be confused with the 24"x12" capacity of the cutter, nor the labeled specifications of material you buy, which will be sold as 24"x12", but will not come in those dimensions.) I then fixed the proportions of the tabs to accurately reflect the thickness of the material. I also adjusted the curvature of the corners on the front and back panels to more accurately reflect the way the joints bend.