My latest custom.

IgnisPhaseOne said:
Meh, I'm thinking of doing a pretty standard wooden box design.

The main thing that it would be is that I was going to make a wood box, use CnC to drill the dowel holes exactly the same, every time, and perfectly aligned. Something cool I think, would be to engrave our "club logo" on the backside of the box. I'm not just making one, although I might run a few "special designs" for myself, and see if I can add any engraving to make them more special.

What do you think about using acrylic for the entire box? Is it cheaper than wood? Is it easy to get and manipulate into a box? How do you fasten them together? IMO, I'm mainly working with wood, and there doesn't seem to be much info on acrylic. Maybe I should take a second look at slagcoin...
Click to expand...

I used 10mm thick acrylic for the entire main structure of the box, which is pricey but resilient and won't warp unless it's in strong, direct heat for quite a while. I designed the box so that it was grooved and would slot together like a piece of flat-pack furniture and be self-supporting.
You can buff any scratches out of acrylic with car colour restorer and scratch removal creams. We use T-cut, but I wouldn't know what the US equivalent is.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Carplan-T-Cut-375ml/dp/B0001OZI8E?ie=UTF8

You can keep acrylics looking brand new for a long time with this stuff.

The reason that you need your materials to be as flat as possible when engraving is that it can alter the depth and line weight if there's any discrepancies in thickness of the the board.

diagram.jpg


The router will always go to the same depth, as represented by the dotted line, but as you notice with the wood being thicker at the right hand side, it will actually appear to take more out of the wood in that area.
You can end up with pictures being a lot heavier in some places than others and is one of the disadvantages of using wood when engraving on a CnC router. It's not impossible by any stretch, but you have to get the flattest piece of wood you can get to prevent it from looking a mess. Because wood naturally expands and contracts a fair amount it's not always an easy task. The diagram is exaggerated for clarity, but even a small amount of change in the thickness can change the way a picture looks.
A pair of vernier calipers are your best friend whenever you do work like that.

We use Bostik Tensol-12 to stick the acrylic, but hot glue seems to stick well also.
 
Wow that is a really impressive stick you even got the russian gang signs on the underplate and everything nice.
 
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