Daisy Serebrin Project 2: Laser Cutter

 In making my Laser Cutting project, I first looked online to get ideas. Once I got the idea to make a candle box, I started designing my candle box on fusion. I wanted to make something simpler than my last project but something I would use. While candles aren't allowed in dorms, I could put a LED candle in instead while here. I started designing my box, but my dimension was off, so I started over. When I started again, I started with one of the sides. I decided I wanted my box to be 4x4 and added the teeth. I then created the other side and did the same steps. After I extruded each side twice so that I could see where the bottom and teeth would go. I thought it was going really well and then I came into problems. Some of my measurements were off and since I found putting measurements on everything and not equaling it, I went in and had to change the measurements on each piece. Ryan and Andrew helped me quite a bit on this because, with one of my sides, there was a gap when combining. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be because I thought it would be easier to make remake my bottom piece. With my pieces done, I changed my extruded pieces to components so that I could put them into illustrator. 

With the box done, I looked for designs that I wanted to come through so that I would get light from the sides as well as the top. I found some ballerinas that I really liked, so I went to photoshop to grab the design that I wanted. Because there was a wood background illustrator would not pick up the design. After grabbing the design, I brought it to illustrator. With my pieces in illustrator, I added the design on top of my pieces. I then brought my bottom design in and was able to trace it with illustrator and added that to the bottom piece. With the box ready to be laser cut, Ryan taught me and we had a little problem with getting the ballerina outline to show up, but by making the line thicker, it worked. After printing the first three pieces. I wanted the bottom design to be thicker so I made it the same thickness as the ballerina outline. There was also a piece of design that didn't get cut out so I had to go back and found out that I forgot to make it red, so I changed that. With some of my pieces, the laser didn't cut all the way through for the outer edge so I took a box cutter to cut what wasn't fully lasered. After I got my pieces out, some of the cutout parts didn't come out so I took a box cutter to poke them out. There was one side that my inner design came out too thin to where it broke when poking so I had to make one more side. After it was cut and the design was poked out, I was able to glue the box together which was the easiest part. I used wood glue, tape, and a wet rag. After gluing the sides, taping so the sides are right next to each other, and whipping the access glue off, I was pretty much done. I came back later to take the tape off. 

During this project, I learned more about Fusion, so hopefully, the next project will go a lot easier. Fusion is what I struggled with the most because I'm still learning the different things that I can do with it.  I think that the box came out really well. I don't think that I would change anything about it if I were to do it again.