It’s a well established woodworking technique called kerf bending. Differs from a living hinge in that cuts do not go through the material.
The cuts being made in the video are superfluous to making the bend. Not sure why they were done, unless the plan is to glue something into those slots. If you did the work, I’m curious about the reason.
I’ve never seen a kerf bent piece produced on a laser, presumably because it’s too hard to get equal sized kerfs at the proper depth and width.
For the interested, search “kerf bending formula” for different approaches to determining how the cuts should be set up.
There’s a great wood working blade from Rockler that takes advantage of that for box making as well:
That blade was the reason I went the extra mile and bought a Bosch Reaxx tablesaw instead of a Sawstop.
I followed the inventor on YouTube before Rockler picked it up.
Terence - I finally put two and two together. What are you up to now, now that you are an alumnus?
Very amazing blade and love what he did with the box. I assume that you can use thinner walled wood by adjusting the dado.
Yes! It’ll work with plywood from 5/64" all the way up to 7/8".
http://go.rockler.com/tech/rockler-miter-fold-dado-set-instructions-sku-54799.pdf
For my day job, an old friend of mine was gracious enough to extend me an offer at his company, designing microscopes and other biotech instruments. Food doesn’t magically show up at lunch time anymore, but I have my own office with a door, my own minions, and a front row seat to how the Shanzhai ecosystem works. (The gentlemen I’m working for is known to bang out 20+ products in a year with very minimal staff.)
I placed my own personal business (OpenBeam / ZT Automations) on hold while I was at Glowforge; back when I joined Glowforge, I was thinking in my head “yeah, maybe there will be a 6 month delay in shipping”. Hah! After mothballing my personal company for almost 2 years, I’m back in the R&D seat with new products coming out in that department as well. :-D.
Wonderful. Looking forward to what you’ll be bringing out from OpenBeam / ZT Automations.