It was finally time to CNC my paint tote! I have to say that this process was much quicker than doing it by hand (of course), but I found that I made more errors because of the ease of implementation.
I found out very quickly that the CNC does not do well with bowed wood. This piece was more bowed than the others, and I suppose I overestimated the strength of the laser. Even after two passss, it didn’t go through enough to use the bottom section. I later found a plywood piece that wasn’t as bowed and it cut just fine, but I completely missed a few joint spots in my Fusion drawing!! I had to cut and recut so many times because of mindless error.
As far as costs go, each plywood piece was roughly $1. Because of my errors, I used 5 pieces, but each box could be done with 3. I used wood glue to connect the pieces, which came to a negligible price. I later decided to rastor an image on some of the faces.
All together, it took over two hours to rastor all of the faces I wanted. This brought my total cost up significantly. Without the rastor, the whole tote took roughly 1-1.5 hours to cut and assemble. Assuming $10/hr if done by hand, a manufactured box could cost about $30 to cut, rastor, and build.
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