I’ve been making tissue box covers (among other things) with various engraved images and thought I’d share a couple of them. My material of choice for most projects is knotty alder, but I sometimes use proof grade materials or 1/4" plywood for small things. My daughter has a Harry Potter themed powder room, so I made a tissue box cover with the crests from the four houses at Hogwarts. For this box I used thick cherry proof grade plywood. I use either Illustrator or a program called Graphic (formerly an Autodesk product, but now unavailable and unsupported) for my designs.
The second tissue box cover has images from the Haunted Mansion ride at Walt Disney World and is made of ~1/4" birch plywood from Home Depot. I wasn’t sure if this one would turn out OK, so it started as an experiment using the rather poor quality HD plywood as I worked out the process for producing the images. It went pretty well, and I ended up completing the box with that material.
The process I worked out for the Haunted Mansion box is probably used by other Glowforge owners, but this is what I did for each panel of the box:
1.Start with an over-size piece and cover one side with painter’s tape
2.Place the the piece, tape side up, on the crumb tray in the Glowforge and hold it in place with a couple magnets. I use two very strong low profile magnets I salvaged from an old disk drive.
3.Tweak the contrast and brightness of the desired B&W image to produce a good engraving. In the design software, draw an irregular bounding vector outboard of the image.
4.Use the bounding vector to score through the painter’s tape, and remove the tape inboard of the scored line.
5.Apply white latex paint to the cleared area and let dry.
6.When the paint is dry, engrave the image in the white-painted area.
7.After engraving, take the piece out of the Glowforge and remove the remaining painter’s tape.
8.Stain the piece outboard of the white painted area.
9.Repeat for the other sides and the top, glue the box pieces together, and when dry, finish with clear polyurethane.
For other projects, I apply clear polyurethane instead of paint to the area inboard of the scored outline before engraving to achieve other effects.
Thanks to everyone for the nice comments! All the interest in the finger joints took me by surprise. I thought lots of people made them that way. As I said in my earlier comment, I find the boxes are easier to assemble with that type of joint- but I’d guess they don’t appeal to everybody.
