My son broke his pencil case at school. I was going to swing over to Staples, but figured I should break out the Glowforge and give it a go.
I first searched the forums for some random inspiration. Loads of pencil case designs, and I still love all of the living hinge designs. But I do not see those surviving a third grade class day, let alone the remainder of the year.
So, a standard tabbed box with a sliding lid sounds right. I would do a hinged lid… but again, I fear an easy break of a critical component.
So, first goal is to figure out how to get my slot for the lid to slide through. Hence posting this in Everything Else instead of Made of a Glowforge.
I ran a few test swipes on some Fluorescent Pink Acrylic. (3.15mm thick)
I did the swipes on the right first. From top to bottom it was Graphic, Deep Graphic, Light, Dark, and then a manual 1000 speed + Full power (twice).
This got me the following measures:
Deep Graphic - 0.5mm
Light - 0.41mm
Dark - 1.00mm
1000/Full (x2) - 2.5mm
Well, back to the prep file to see how deep I actually wanted this thing to be… measures out that I am looking for a 1.63mm depth. None of these worked.
So… the auto settings won’t work for me, I have to do a manual, but the manual I did try was too strong.
Now the bars on the left need to be done. From top to bottom these were 1000/80(x2), 900/Full, 800/Full, 700/Full, 500/Full. I did not record all of my measures on this one, because the 700/Full looked good and measured out to 1.67mm. Close enough!
Okay, now that I have my slot settings, gotta figure out a design to put on the sides. Xien (my son) loves Pokemon right now, so I searched google for a few images and found some nested evolution silhouettes. Those were awesome, so I grabbed a bunch.
Problem was that using them as straight image files gave me greyscale style engraves as the automatic settings, and those ruined the silhouette nature, and had a bunch of artifacts.
So… Inkscape to the rescue! I used Trace Bitmap, Brightness Cutoff. 0.45 worked on most of the images, but a few had three colors instead of simple black and white. Those ones I stayed with brightness cutoff and just did two traces, then combined the parts which were good.
End results?
I had actually done the whole thing wrong the first try. I accidentally left the tabs in place above the lid (made it a huge pain to slide the lid on, since the slot was just touching the tab bottoms), and I forgot to remove the slot and tabs from the front panel completely.
But… failed box was trimmed down to remove the lid slot and will serve as a box at the house for whatever they decide to throw in it.
(I also hadn’t embellished the bottom panel on my first try)