Day 7: Aiden C

    Today was essentially continuing up from what we started yesterday, working on our wood and eventually making a box out of it!

    I started today with the cut sides of all my boxes that I had finished yesterday, and my goal was to start making the dados in the wood (Little notches for the acrylic front to fit into). The other students were still cutting their miters in their wood, so I had to wait for them, and in that time I designed and measured the cut I would need for my acrylic, the clear glass-like material that I am using for the front of my shadowbox. I measured the size on the inside of my box, added 0.188 to every side, and took away 0.05 from each axis, so that my acrylic would be the right size for my box, but not too big. Once I started cutting, it was pretty fast, much to my amazement because this was light cutting through pretty thick plastic, but the laser cutter performed perfectly. My only complaint is that when I took out the acrylic it smelt quite stinky, and I had to put it back into the laser cutter and let it air out.

    Once the other students were done cutting their wood, Mr. Grisbee gave us a lesson on the cuts we needed to do and I got to work! It was a relatively quick process for me to cut all my wood and get it ready for my box, which readied me to start gluing and to get my box put together. Here is a timelapse video of what we did:

    Basically, we taped up all the pieces so that we could fit them together, put glue on all the edges, fold it up into a box shape, and put even more tape to make sure that it's strongly held together, before finally leaving it to dry.  Here's what the shadoxbox looks like put together:

And here it is in the dark:

Anyways, that is all we did today, but tomorrow I will be making a small frame, adding the backing (chipboard), and sanding it to make sure it looks its best!

Thanks for reading!

Aiden