I’d still call that a living hinge though. 
Fantastic work! Thanks for sharing so much of the process.
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Yeah if you used it as a hinge it’d eventually break so technically you’re correct. 
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That is how it had been done since wood was invented. Interesting to see the results using the laser.
Truth is, a small hand saw adjusted right would probably be more efficient.
Made awesome curved wood projects with my Dad forever ago using this technique and dampened wood in shaping jigs was a proven winner.
But when you got a laser everything burns…
I think the living hinge popularity is more the newness of it than the functionality.
Just plain bowed wood has a grace that living hinges lack.
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When you have a hammer… 
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Beautiful job and great explanation. Thanks for sharing!!!
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I was thinking hard about this before the Glowforge even arrived. When I first discussed it Jules made note of someone who did use that technique but was not very positive of how well it worked. The conversation was last nov? or so but could not find it,
When the Glowforge arrived my very first cut was a trial of that concept and I still have that piece hanging about. my hope was to shape the sawtooth and pull the wood into a compound “saddle curve”. That saddle concept was a fail but it bent to about 190 degrees and remains so to this day.
My next wild experiment was to make the wood bend 360 degrees and this was the post about that…
After a lot more experimentation I found the engrave to be superfluous, as long as the wood was very wet and you were very careful not to “surprise” the wood but to bend it slowly. I also found that alcohol both got the wood wet faster and dry faster, even replacing water when I bleached the wood.
That design for a core base is very interesting and I use it a lot but as I am always looking for round, I have a collection of cans and jars of the range of diameters I need. Of some interest to your project, I have found that both inner and outer support are a good thing and will hold the object tight while it dries. Once fully dry it will keep the shape well. However, a point I missed for a long time is that the wet wood grows and it shrinks a lot as it dries (it is that differential drying that seems to be a major cause of warping) I found that an 8-inch piece of wood can be 8.5 inches when wet and dry back to 8-inches. that will mean that you need to allow for that difference when setting up and drying that the shrinkage can break the wood if there is no give. also I was driving myself crazy measuring to size only to find that the piece was smaller when I tried to assemble it.
edit:I ran across that first ever piece:
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@jules ? Know what he’s talking about? I’m just curious if anyone had “finished” and posted anything like this yet, it would be fun to compare notes.
@rbtdanforth did some flexible cuts of hexagon patterns, but not this sort of pure bend, except maybe the aforementioned saddle which sounds like an experiment more than a finished piece.
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There was a hex pattern for the light to show through but the back side was a 35LPI engrave that was using the kerf/line thickness to provide the give I had thought was needed. In the end I discovered that the soaking was key and the engraved bit effect was minor. the hex pattern played no part as a “Living hinge” and even with very thin parts that are not perpendicular to the bend
the results usually unbalance the forces and makes the bends more difficult.
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Ummm… flexible-ish then? In any case not quite the same sort of bend.
Now that is just st the most gorgeous thing I’ve seen in a long time. Thanks for sharing the process!
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This is my first cut that even now the GFUI tries to go there and as I have tried to get rid of it the GFUI crashes and goes to the start screen every time I start it.
It was exactly what you are talking about I was just using a finer spacing.
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Time to start designing a GF-made clamp ?
John 
Reading old posts apparently uses up likes really quickly.
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I wish I could dump 1000 likes on this. I can’t wait to see what I can do with it.
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I would think that you had another box with only owls (and perhaps a third with only ravens)?
You might think that, but you’d be giving me way too much credit.
Click on the “The hard way” text, and I show how I figured it out. I basically did it incorrectly, slapped myself on the forehead, and tried again. Irritating because I didn’t combine the engraves into a single image, so it did them all separately and it took about 25 minutes to cut a set of sides.
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I found the opposite problem when I set up what is now my business card with engraved dragon on one side and text on the other. I started with an array of them and ended up with 16 layers with just the dragon image. So I uploaded just one and copy/pasted 15 more in the GFUI still able to move them about to take advantage of scrap (And even scale a bit to fit) but only one image to assign properties to. It still did them one at a time but as the round shape makes a short trip top and bottom, there is less travel not doing anything making it possibly faster.
Yeah I considered this possibility, and the loss of mobility of the pieces if I locked all the engraves into a single raster. In the end I decided to suck it up and deal with the length of the job. It all worked out in the end.
If engraved sideways so it skipped over the blank spaces you would have a much quicker job.
When I did my first experiments it was literally my first ever use of a laser so did not know anything about variable depth cuts and so made a lot of them depending on the kerf in each cut. now I am wondering about using a standard “living hinge” design engraved on just one side to bend thicker wood, putting all the give in compression and none in stretch as is the concept we are talking about, but also not providing a break line where it is bent.
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