laser cutting – Alexander Miles

Big update: More boxes, more shirts, and beer!

It's been a good while since I've set aside time to scratch out an update, but not for lack of activity. Rather than split all the projects across several posts, I'm opting for one big one! On the woodworking side, I pulled two boxes together: one to house the awkwardly large Planechase planes, and a tea-box as a mother's day gift.

While planning out the Planechase box, I stuck to the philosophy that each new project needs to have at least one element I haven't wrestled with before. This time: hinges, felt lining, and one-piece box construction! For materials I went with a plank of bubinga that I picked up a few weeks ago, with curly maple and blue paua shell for the inlays. The lid and bottom were attached with rabbets and the corners 45-degree mitered. A small riser was added to the dice-holding compartment to make it easier to get at them.

The planeswalker symbol in curly maple inlay

Loaded with all the sleeved planes and dice!

Planechase anthology symbol inlaid in blue paua shell

It was my sister's idea to whip up something together for mother's day, and we hit upon the idea of a tea box. She provided the graphics for the lid, helped select materials, and provided plenty of encouragement. Ribbon sapele and bird's-eye maple were picked for the box and top/bottom respectively. For the joinery I decided to make it as fancy as possible, and ended up building a dead-simple box-joint jig for the table saw. After a few tests, I was able to make nice tight-fitting box joints in the fancy wood! The patterns were laser'd on, and a small inlay of niove was glued in.

Ribbon sapele showing off the finger joints

While digging through my closet I came across an early attempt at a megaman shirt and decided that it'd make a good target for a re-do. I hunted down a suitable graphic and went through what, at this point, is a tried and true process. I'm much happier with the result!

Lastly, I got bit by the home-brew bug a week or two ago! I dug out and inventoried my equipment, and picked up an ingredient kit at the local brew shop. When thinking about the trajectory, I realized I don't really have a group of thirsty grad-student friends to conscript for bottling day any more, so I took the next logical step: a kegging setup!

With that set up, current dispensing sparkling water, we got started on the brewing. A scotch ale was the order of the month. The brewing was briefly put on hold while the fittings on our new kettle got a few wraps of plumbers tape, but after that there were no issues during the boiling, cooling, or moving it to the sanitized carboy. A couple days after pitching the yeast, some drama struck!

The fermentation was a bit over-zealous! We quickly ran out for some 1/2" tubing, and fitted it as a blow-off tube, the far end submerged in dilute sanitizer. By the next evening it was done pushing out krausen, and has settled into a slow and study bubbling. In retrospect, a fairly surgery brew in a smaller-sized carboy; I should've expected this and fitted the tube right off the bat, but learning is fine too. Bottling went smoothly, with half going into about 20 bottles, the rest going into the keg.

Woodworking: Inlaid Box for Cube

This is a project I've had in the back of my head for more than a year now. Every few months it'd resurface and I'd jot down some dimensions, look into materials, and inevitably get distracted by life. A week ago I had totally open weekend and decided that it was time. Unfortunately I didn't pause to take progress shots, but the vast majority of the techniques are the same as I used in the deckbox and land station. The corners are miter joints, the "floor" and lid are set into 1/8" deep rabbets all the way around, and the dividers simply slot into 1/8" deep dados on both sides.

Materials-wise, I stuck with maple for the frame, with bird's eye figure this time, ceder for the dividers, and baltic birch plywood for the lid and floor. The ceder was a lot softer than I anticipated, but I don't expect much wear on the dividers, and the smell is amazing. The inlay materials are cherry veneer, three colors of paua shell veneer, and five semi-precious stones (being pearl, blue onyx, onyx, carnelian, and malachite).

After sanding to 600 grit the maple and cherry got a coat of danish oil, producing a lovely warm and deep look, but I found in testing that the plywood looked miserable and blotchy with that approach. I ended up going with a few layers of spray varnish and a final sanding with 600 grit and ultra fine steel wool on the plywood, giving it a satin feel and slightly warming up the color without any of the blotching.

Laser cutting the lotus pieces (sorry for the vertical video, I know)

The veneers and lid-inset were all laser cut, requiring six different cutting patterns to get everything matched up and at the right burn-depth. Needless to say, some experimentation went into this process. An additional mini-project came out of this testing as well, which I'll post later on!

The veneers were attached with a thin later of Titebond I (I know there are better glues, even just TB III, but I didn't want to put off this project for another week) and clamped with wax paper for an hour. The same spray vanish and rub-out procedure was used on both sides of the lid, giving it a wonderful feel. Finally the stones were secured with a drop of cyanoacrylate super glue each.

While this project was only a marginal step up in complexity, I still learned a ton while working through it. While every small mistake and blemish that ended up in the final piece stand out a lot to me, I'm still really happy with the result!

Woodworking: Curly Maple Deckbox

My second real project in wood, a commander-sized deckbox, represented a step up in joint complexity and wood quality. I also had to deal with an unexpected issue, namely wood movement. The board of curly maple was purchased months ahead of time, with a couple different ideas in mind, and during that interval it went from a beautifully flat and square board, to a pringles-chip shaped board with slightly off-true edges. Had I been more motivated, I suppose I could have use a hand plane and pared it down to flat. With time at a premium, and a deep conviction that clamping and gluing can do amazing things, I did my best to roll with it.

I also tried to remember to take process photos as I went, not only to share here, but also for my own benefit the next time I kick off a project. The basic design was pretty simple: rabbet joints, rabbet joints everywhere. The four vertical walls of the box all get an eighth-inch deep 3/4 inch tall rabbet along their bottom edge to accommodate a beefy cheery base, and additional rabbets along the vertical edge for the left and right sides. One concern from the outset was the stability of cutting an eighth inch of material away from panels only a quarter inch thick, but going slowly, it did work out. Additionally, an eighth inch deep, quarter inch tall, slot was cut into the back and side panels to allow for a side-in lid. It's worth noting here that the lid had to be subtly tapered by sanding the edges meant to mate with the slots to allow for easy movement.

The raw materials were a 24" x 5" x 0.25" board of curly maple, and a 3/4" thick board of cherry (which I'd previously been using as a backstop to prevent tear-out when sawing). Both boards were wider than my miter box would allow, so I ended up using clamps and the straight edge of other boards to establish the cuts. In the photo below, the saw is neatly guided by straight-edged stock on both sides.

With all the pieces cut, the front panel (notably 0.25" shorter than the others, to permit the lid to slide out) was off to the laser cutter. I should also note, the design is not mine, it was found here, and was simply too cool to pass up. Maple takes laser engraving very well, and even grey-scale depth features were rendered very well.

Unfortunately I forgot to take any photos during the routing step, but they were all executed with a 0.25" flat router bit at medium-low speed. For the finish, I wanted the grain to really pop, so I used the remainder of the board as a test piece (seen far left in the photo below). The top portion of the test piece got two coats of diluted anoline dye, then two coats of Danish oil, while the bottom simply got the oil. I settled on dye+oil again, but in retrospect should probably have gone darker (less dilute) on the dye. The blue-taped areas, aside from the test piece, were to exclude oiling the gluing surfaces.

After a brief dry-fit, gluing and clamping went on for two days. I did have to make a second pass, as a small gap opened up in one of the corners, but after that it looked good.

Finally, here are some photos of the final product!

I probably won't rely so heavily on rabbet joints in the future, but this was super instructive in the difficulties and details of executing them. Also, this came together more quickly than the first project! As I get my basic skills in line, things go a bit faster and smoother, but there's still seemingly infinite room still to grow.

Woodworking: MTG Land Station

I've been playing around with the idea of woodworking for pretty much the whole year now, watching videos on YouTube and tearing through a few books on the topic. I did a few simple projects leaning heavily on the laser cutter to do all the operations, but that isn't really woodworking. I finally decided to put together a land station, that is, a box for people to grab basic lands on those rare times a draft comes together!

The design is fairly simple, four planks of wood for the sides of the box, with 45 degree mitred edges, and four dados (slots) for dividers, plus a flat plank as a bottom. The dimenions of a card are (roughly) 3.5 inches tall, but 2.5 inches wide, and I ran with those for my first attempt. Trying to put a 45 degree miter along a 3.5 inch edge with a hand saw was a losing battle, and the prospect of putting in eight dados with a router plane (something like this) sounded frustrating. After quite a bit of hemming and hawing, I eventually bit the bullet and bought a router, some bits, and a table for it. While there was a sale going on at the time, I certainly had to convince myself that I'm excited for more than this one project.

The dimensions were driven in part by the cheap wood I had access to, namely long planks of quarter-inch thick, 3.5 inch wide pine. I kept the height and stuck with a single thickness to simplify the sawing operations, which are harder than they look. I ended up using a cheap clamping mitre box to establish a perpendicular cut line, and then clamped the piece to a heavy piece of scrap for the remainder of the cut to prevent tear-out (an issue that frustrated me enormously at first.)

My initial design had tolerances that ended up being too tight, and it was going to be impossible to get the cards in and out. The final dimensions of each piece are laid out below. The critical number turned out to be 2.75 inches - the width of the empty space (measured from divider edge to divider edge, not centers) for each card "lane". If that sounds a little too big, it's because it is, but a small error one way or the other won't prevent cards from getting into or out of the box. In the future I'll probably shave 1/8th inch off that value to reduce card "jiggle" in something like a deck box.

2x sides (L/R) - 3.5" x 5.5" x 0.25"
2x sides (F/B) - 3.5" x 15.25" x 0.25"
1x bottom - 5.5" x 15.25" x 0.25"
4x dividers - 3.5" x 5.25" x 0.25"

The dados to retain the dividers are 1/8th (0.125) inch deep on the front and the back, and were cut with the fence fixed to ensure they ended up aligned. I had to make up a 90 degree jig by clamping some heavy blocks to cut the furthest-in dados, as the fence can only move about 5 inches back from the bit, but it worked well enough. The mitres were put on with a 45 degree router bit, over many passes to carefully creep up on the proper depth. Once all the cuts were done, the front panel was off to the laser.

The pattern was generated using the vector mana symbols generously posted by Goblin Hero over at Slightly Magic, they had just to be scaled and moved around to fit the panel. I put down some masking tape to prevent resin deposition on the wood, but it also seems to have caused some line-artifacts in the final cut, likely due to "thick" overlaps attenuating the beam. In the future I'll probably avoid using tape and just sand the surface clean afterward, as the residual adhesive also looked to interfere with the dye and oil in a few places. For reference, it was cut on an Epilog Ext36 150W in raster mode at 600 DPI, 100% speed, 70% power, in a single pass.

After sanding all the sides with a ~250 git sanding sponge, the sides and panels were glued together using titebond and a 90 degree clamp, something I didn't even know existed before needing one. I was able to snugly fit in the divider into the back without glue, and press the front panel on for gluing.

Gluing the front panel (bottom is not attached)

After letting it dry over night, I was ready to dye and finish it. I'd experimented with some scrap wood from the same boards to see how the dye and oil finishes would look, and settled on Transtint golden brown diluted in water, and a Danish Oil finish. I applied the dye carefully, given all the warnings it comes with, and gave it plenty of time to dry. Then the oil finish went on and took all night to set, I opted for a single layer as I wasn't looking for a shiny or silky appearance, just sealed. At this point I finally glued on the bottom and gave it a few hours to set.

It definitely took a lot more time, effort, and learning to finish this than I anticipated, but I am happy with how it came out. I've already gotten a lot of good suggestions for improving it (e.g. cutting semi-circular access holes at the front of each row so you can always get at the cards, also adding a lid isn't a bad idea), but will probably move on to other projects for the time being. The next on my list is a commander deck box, and after that, a substantially more intricate box for my cube to live in. I've got to spread out that tooling cost somehow!