Brain Storming and Ideation
A student planning to major in architecture, I knew I didn’t want to design and assemble anything of the architecture nature because I was too familiar with it. My greatest inspiration and model has always been my mother, so knowing that I always start a project with an inspiration, I knew I wanted her to be mine for this project.
While I thought about what I wanted to do for my laser cutting project, I thought there was a great opportunity with a storage container of some sort. Initially, I had been thinking about just a plain old box decorating it with some Bible verses. However, I liked the idea of creating a container for a bible, and looking through projects online I liked the idea of a book box.
Browsing through the book boxes that were online, in my opinion, were just plain boxes. My mother is very special to me so I wanted to show a story with the container with a picture. The container itself needed a story and not just a use. This is where the 3D picture of my own story came into place. Different tones of laser raster engraving or wood staining could be used in the story to be able to show depth. Several layers will be put together going into the box to create an illusion of three dimensional.
The final piece of the project will be using paper to create a book with some of the selected verses in the Bible to show my mothers importance to me and the Father’s love for her. Adding lace textures at the end was going to add more embelishment.
My sketch ideas were the book box and the booklet that would be put inside of it. Materials would mostly be the wood for the book box and paper for the booklet. These were some of the sketches that I drew to explain my ideas:
File Work
Designing for the box became mathematical as I started thinking about what size, width, length, as well as other elements I wanted the box to have. I had to think about the width to be able to think about the circumference the live hindge was supposed to pivot. After figuring out all of the math, this was the result of the files I had made for the book box assembly, the picture inside the box, and the booklet pages.
It all came out together really well. A lot of the repeated lines and patterns were copied and then pasted to be able to make the process go by faster, while some of the more organic lines were the ones that took a while to draw out. Using different layers in my design became helpful for the inside picture to be able to see how it would come together and how I needed to separate the layers.
Finally it was time to test out the files and see that everything went well with the prototype. Thinking that I had done everything correctly mathematically and with the line work, I was ready to see a successful piece… or so I thought.
Prototyping/Iteration
For the prototype, I decided to exclude some of the engraving parts on the files because I really just wanted to make sure I got the structure correct. Initially I started with cardboard for the book box, but as it was cutting, it started a fire. Cardboard became my first failure. For this project, it was not the material that I needed to work with. Knowing I needed a better quality material, I chose to experiment with MDF which resulted in a success. What was not successful this time, was the circumference of the live hinge, which was too long leaving the edges of the cover hanging way more than what was desired. Changes in the file were made and I was able to successfully put together the box.
Another problem with starting fires that I ran into was the picture file. I believe some of the trees had to many points on it which made the laser take longer in those areas and resulted in burning off most of the trees. During my appointment, I made some quick changes to make the edges of the trees smoother which then resulted in the success of the picture. This was the same picture that I used for my final project.
Testing out the paper file was easy and was very successful. Although the size of the interior of the book box was not taken into consideration leaving the actual paper too large for it to fit into the box, I decided to exlude laser cutting the booklet. An alternative for this became printing and manually cutting pages for the booklet. I decided to do this because laser cutting the pages would have become time consuming, taking into account that each page took about 25 minutes to cut. Because there is so many details in the edges of the pages, it was evident that the laser cutter was going to be taking too much time on this.
To make up for this decision, I decided to make a photo frame with my mother and I along with some writing. I had no time to prototype, so I knew that it had to be perfect and no error could be accounted for.
Final Assembly
For Final Assembly, I decided to sand all of the parts before glueing pieces together. Even after glueing, I went back in to sand a little bit of the edges. Pages that had been printed out were simply glued together. Final assembly:
