Heart-shaped trinket box I designed and made from laser-ply (plywood) for Mother’s Day. My Mum loved it.
Acrylic laser cut for mounting the Digispark, LCD and Ultrasonic Rangefinder for my name badge.
Laser cut hub on my 48-wheeled Rover 5.
My first attempt at laser cutting. Roy of Zero Waste Design took us through the use of Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape before showing us how to use one of MAKLab’s laser cutters.
If I provided the LP record, could you laser cut a NY city scene and make it a clock?
Joyce, Unfortunately LP Records are not suitable for laser cutting as they give off a nasty gas (harmful for the machine and the operators). I’ve had some success with CNC milling LP Records, see my page on CNC Routing, however I don’t have access to a suitable machine since the one I used previously has moved up to MAKE Aberdeen. I’ve seen someone posting fantastic artwork done by hand using a Dremel tool on LP Records, perhaps this is something you could investigate?
Do you have the drawing/CAD files for your heart shaped trinket box? I am really interested in making something like that but I’m struggling with drawing it.
I would really appreciate you sharing the drawings.
Cad files for the heart shaped box can be download as dxf or PDF.
Your heart shaped box is simply awesome! I would love to make this for my mother as well. Do you have any files of this box that you would be willing to share? I would really appreciate it,
thank you for your time!
Cad files for the heart shaped box can be download as dxf or PDF.
Hi,
I love this shape. I can ask you something. Can you do two more files? bigger and biggest but still for 3mm plywood like Matryoshka?
Hi Rado, while it sounds possible I won’t be taking on the challenge. You could give this a go yourself with some free software (i.e. Inkscape, DraftSight, FreeCAD etc) or a trial of Autodesk AutoCAD and using this design as a starting point. Let me know how you get on!
Hi Markcra,
Love your heart trinket box. I’m fascinated with living hinge designs, but joints on living hinges gives me a lot of problems. How do you design the joints (“fingers”) on your heart box, so that it fits with the corresponding cutout on the other parts of the box, e.g. base & top? Do you calculate the location of the cutouts or determine it through trial & error?
Thanks,
Steve
Hi Steve,
This box was a little experiment and I didn’t expect it to work first time. I used the circumference of the arc to determine how long the side panels should be and added regular tabs/joints/fingers. The size of spacing for the living hinge and the tabs was a guesstimate which worked first time. That said, the position of the tabs was planned out though it wasn’t really calculated, I just concentrated on the inside edge and let the outside of the box do whatever. If it didn’t work I’d have adapted the design and cut it again and again until I’d have it figured out.