Scott Wald Project 2: Laser cutter

 Process

At the start I completed the pencil box tutorial from Ryan, and after some thought I came up with a few tweaks and features I wanted to add. I started by making the box a little longer I think and making it a bit taller. This was a simple use of the dimension feature in Fusion 360. Then I added a sketch for the middle divider by creating points on the short side so that I could copy features of the short side I liked and omit features that wouldn't work. After this I created a toothy design on the sides that I saw on laser cut boxes around the makerspace. After the fusion 360 designs were complete I exported the files to the rayjet and had them cut. Then I took one side piece and used the laser printer to print text that I wanted on the side of the pencil box. Finally I used a mallet to pound pieces that fit well together and used wood glue to hold in the smaller sides.


Result

I am pretty glad with how it turned out and I think I will definitely make more things like this in the future. One thing I learned along the way is a technique to create the little teeth on the sides. In fusion 360 there is a copy and paste feature that is a nice cop out, but this can lead to bad outcomes with measurements. Instead I mathed it out and found that if I added the number of teeth I wanted to itself and added 1 and multiplied this by the length of the teeth, everything would work out great and nothing would be overconstrained. For the middle divider's side teeth, I used a dimension function that divided the total length in half and then subtracted half of the thickness of the material, which put the hole directly in the middle of the material. 








Reflection

I initially had a substantial amount of trouble with sketches in Fusion 360, but it turns out I just wasn't starting my sketches at the origin. After I learned my lesson Fusion 360 as a whole became much easier. For the laser cutter I wish I had better specified what to cut because some small pieces of the bottom piece came through on the dxf files. This wasn't a big deal because I could just glue the pieces back in, but it was a bit of a silly step that could have been avoided. Also I wish I was more careful with the pieces initially because my hands got super dirty with soot and made my pencil box a bit dirty. Next time I think I may put gloves on before or use a paper tower to push pieces out.














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