Setting Up Your Work Area for Precise Control

When working with small parts and precise measurements, it's essential to have your work area set up for optimal control. To achieve this, you want to switch to object snap mode and set your distance to 5 mm for control. This will allow you to snap objects to the grid more accurately. Additionally, you'll want to toggle on snap to grid to ensure that all your measurements and manipulations align perfectly with the grid.

A Divisible Grid is Essential for Precise Work

To create a divisible grid, go to settings and adjust the unit to millimeters (mm). Then, set your cursor to a 10 mm distance. Hold down the shift key while clicking on the grid line to snap objects precisely to that location. This setup will help you work more efficiently and reduce errors.

Creating an Equally Divisible Square

To create an equally divisible square, use the Shift + click function to pull out a new object while holding the shift key. Change this object's dimensions to match your desired measurement (in this case, 200 mm). Ensure that your lock is engaged and adjust the object's position until it snaps into place on the grid line.

Setting Up for MDF Box Construction

For the construction of an MDF box, you'll want to set up your work area with precise control. Double-check that your measurements are accurate by using the object snap function and snapping objects to the grid. Ensure that your material thickness is doubled to account for both the material itself and any curves or edges.

Creating a Precise Curve

To create a precise curve, use the object snap function to double your measurement value (in this case, 0.07 mm). Double-check that your measurements are accurate by using the object snap function and snapping objects to the grid.

Grouping Objects for Easy Manipulation

For more complex constructions like MDF boxes, it's essential to group objects together for easy manipulation. Select all objects you want to manipulate and group them. Then, copy and paste the selected objects to create multiple copies of your original shape. This will save time and reduce errors in your construction process.

Subtracting Objects for Precise Edges

When subtracting objects to create precise edges, use the Shift + click function to select all grouped objects and hit the subtract command (usually represented by the 'X' key). This will help you eliminate unnecessary material and achieve a clean edge.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're going to talk about making perfect finger joints with your laser what's up guys I'm Nick and this is build dad build and today it's all about that box today we're going to be making finger joints with our laser why are we doing it with the laser well for a couple of reasons one to cut these in a wood shop you need to create yourself a jig a lot of times you need a special blade either a d stack or a flat top single blade you're going to need some tools you may not have like like a table saw or a router and I've seen a lot of people have confusion on how to cut so basically when you cut one side then you have to cut the mating side and I think you flip the piece over on your table saw I I don't know but it's a pain in the ass using a laser you're going to get even Cuts all the way across there's little room for human error if you set everything upu right and the biggest thing you need to understand about finger joints when you're working on the laser is curf we'll get to that in just a second now I will give you a couple of cons for doing finger joints on a laser one of them is you are kind of limited on how thick a material you can cut this is half inch this was done on 100 watt CO2 once you get over about 3/4 of an inch you start getting a little bit of an angle to your cut because your laser is going back out of focus you can't help this with different focal lengths sometimes but but in my experience material under 3/4 of an inch is about what you can get away with on a laser the size you can cut maybe Limited by the framework of your laser if you're using a diode using a CO2 it may be limited to your bad size I won't be working on anything really big today but I will be using the AP laser downstairs and the AP laser does have the open architecture where you can just drop the bed out of the way and run whatever material whatever size through there so when you get up into the more professional commercial grade lasers you run into less of that problem we will be cutting our finger joints on a CO2 laser today but you can use a dial Laser your settings are obviously just going to be different however with the CO2 you can cut thicker material faster you'll see an example of this at the end of the video but before we can get into building our boxes we need to talk about curve now you may have heard of curf before or maybe not curf in woodworking is usually the width of the blade so if you drew a line on a piece of wood and you and you cut directly on that line the width of your table saw blade or your miter saw blade or whatever is going to cut a little material on either side of that line so usually in woodworking if you want to get an exact measurement you're going to cut to the far side of that line because the material you remove is going to mess up your measurement now you have the same thing with the laser it's the beam size it's much smaller than it would be with a blade but it still exists so first we need to figure out what that measurement is so we can add that measurement to the size of the joints of our box so it'll fit together correctly all right cupcakes let's figure out what our curf is so I like to use this generator it's just a little bit more straightforward for curf I feel I'll link this down below but O2 creative. co.nz is the generator that I use for a lot of different Power grids because it gives you kind of an example what it's going to look like and then if you come down here you can adjust it and we have a curve generator right here go ahead and click on that and this is going to show us how to find the curve for your laser okay so we're going to be working on this top row here this is two different ways to figure out your curve one you can get pieces that fit together two you can get these little circles to see if they fit in the holes or we're going to start out with .5 mm and we're going to go to positive .5 mm and we're going to step it up by 0.1 mm at a time we're going to set our cut setting the cut setting is going to cut these out the label is going to engrave the numbers on here so you don't get these mixed up now I'm using a 100 watt CO2 laser my material is quarter inch MDF so these settings are going to be for my machine you may have to adjust these for yours but my cut power is going to be 85% and we're going to go 22 I'm sorry 20 millimet per second for our label power we're going to go 30% and we're going to go 130 millimet per second okay so I'm going to generate lightburn file that is going to give me this file right here as you can see I've done this a couple time so now we're going to just take this file drop it into lightburn and load it into the laser and this is what the test is going to look like in lightburn now I'm going to take these down to the Easy Bake Oven and we are going to get to a laser in okay so here's our first curve test over here we went ne5 to positive point5 let's come over here don't pay attention to these yet and I'll show you what we found out this is negative .5 for obviously for what we're doing we're not going to deal in the negatives but this gives you a good idea of if you have too little curf that it gets loose this would be a better task for when you're trying to work with curf offset but we're not going to get into that today and then we got our 0 five which is obviously way too tight look at that it can't even get in the crass it can't get in the crack baby that's your home are you too good for your home it just doesn't fit this would mean that the beam of our laser is5 mm wide which is huge so in doing the first test I came up with our 0.0 Z is a little loose if you can see that it doesn't quite grab and our 0.1 is pretty tight if you can hear that pull apart it's tight so I went ahead and ran a second test where I tested 0.00 all the way through 0.10 at the hundreds of a millimeter so this first one is 0.01 and as you can see that's still kind of loose as we get to about five actually that's still that's still decently loose does grab a little bit but not a whole lot it doesn't have that gorilla grip if you know what I'm talking about once we get down to about seven this is a good joint for if we want to glue it because we want it to we want it to fit in there good we want it to have enough give that a little glue will get in these kvases and give us that sticky icky if you know what I mean if you know what I mean give me some sticky icky now if you want a straight friction fit and I mean like that true gorilla gripper then you're probably want to go want to go more with a 0.10 um as you can see that this is that's that's tight that's tight if that's too tight if you can't get your joints together when they're real small uh then you might want to drop it down to a 09 but today we are going to be using the 0.07 for two reasons one because it's d07 right H and two like I said it's just got a little bit of give so we can get a little bit of glue in there because we're going to glue our box together today but now that we've discovered our curf we're going to go upstairs and we're going to use this number to figure out how to make our boxes welcome back cupcakes now that we know what our curf is we can go ahead and start making our box first thing we're going to do is use an online generator these are normally for someone who isn't going to be making a lot of boxes maybe you just need to make a box for like a oneoff or something like that and you don't really want to learn how to create them manually I suest using one of these generators for the first few boxes that you make just so you can get an idea of what they should look like in lightburn there's a bunch of different box generators online I'll link these down below you've got maker Design Lab you've got maker case you've got boxes. py and this is what I used to use but lately it's been kind of nonresponsive it takes a long time for stuff to generate but I've kind of started using cuddle a little bit more now because you can see your your box as you design it so today we're going to be using cuddle fair warning cuddle has a free version and a paid version the free version allows you to make five projects a month if you're going to be making more projects then you need to upgrade to the pro version to start with cuddle you're going to have to come in and create an account I'm already signed in you don't need to put in any credit card information or anything like that for the free version come to templates scroll down to laser cut box so just the open box with finger joints click on that one of the big things I like about this is you can see as you change your box so if we want this to be 8 in instead of four you'll see a change in the preview window here also if you're not sure exactly what to do there's a video tutorial right here there's also written directions on how to assemble it the default is inches but we're going to switch everything to millimeters just so we can be consistent with our other box that we'll be making okay so our width is going to be 200 our depth is going to be 200 and our height is going to be 200 so we have a just a square box here next we're going to be using quarter inch material so we're going to change this to 6.35 and then our curace we've already figured out is 0.07 here you can turn the labels off if you don't want them to be obviously labeled and then you can go ahead and download this from here or you can come up and use their editor and this is where you can customize your project a little bit better and now I can come in here and each one of these is editable so the front if I hit front then it's just going to pull up that one piece and let's say I don't want this here so I'm going to take that off or if you want to put a hole in the middle of those for whatever reason or something like that you can drag and drop different shapes we can delete that let's you could put text on here you can put text on here and say box or you could just do like an emoji which is what we're going to do we'll go ahead and put a smiley face on there just for funsies okay but once we're done editing this you just come up to file you can export it as an SVG a PDF a PNG or a dxf file we going to export it as an SVG now what we'll do is we'll just open up lightburn so you guys can see what this looks like in lightburn that's what it's going to look like and then you can edit this from here so you can definitely take these and set the cut lines and then of course to do the smiley face we just come in here to the The Fill layer all right cupcakes we are back in lightburn so this is how to do more customizable finger joints if you're going to be making a lot of boxes I would suggest you learn how to do it in light bur it's always easier to build something in lightburn and then send it to your laser then build it someplace else bring it into light bur that's just one more step that that could cause some sort of error or inconsistency so this one involves some setup and understanding how lightburn works this is a brief overview of Louisiana hobby guys video I suggest you check out Rich's video for a more in-depth explanation on exactly how this works I will link his video down below basically you're going to come into your setup and what you want to do is I already have all these set you want your visual grid spacing to be 10 mm we're working in millimeters by the way grid snap distance 10 click selection tolerance 1 object snap distance 10 down here for control Arrow you want to switch this to 5 mm and for just the arrow you want to switch it to 10 this all sets up your work area to be divisible by five and working on a 10 mm grid things will snap to grid better for you so make sure to have snap to grid selected once you have all that set up now we want an equally dividable Square so let's go 200 mm again hold shift pull that out make sure our lock is engaged change this to 200 mm if you grab it by the center you'll see how it snaps to the grid line so if I pop it right here you'll notice that if you count these squares there is 20 squares there so each one is 10 mm I'm going to take another Square I'm going to pull it out and then let's make this 40x40 for the time being we want our tabs to be 40 m M wide and I'm just making these tabs kind of huge so you can see how this works a little bit better normally you'd want to do something more like a 20 millimeter wide or maybe even a 10 depending on the fingers you want and I'm going to pull this up so you guys can see this okay so our material is 6.35 MM thick we double that to 12.7 mm then our curve is 07 we want to double that so that's .14 we we add all that together and we come up with a thickness of 12.84 we're going to change our height to 12.84 so our width is going to stay the same our height is basically double what our thickness plus curf is so what we want to do is grab this and we're going to bring this over here and as you see it kind of snaps right on that line and we're going to find the center and we're just going to put it right there so we have thickness plus curve on one side and thickness plus curve on the other side that's the reason we're doubling everything so that's the benefit of of setting all of this up initially is so these will all snap into place so I'm going to copy paste bring this over here I want I don't want to go right on the edge because they they'll overlap I'm going to copy paste go right over here this is one side of a portion of our box what I'm going to do is grab these all three of them and group them and then I'm going to copy them paste them and I'm going to bring this guy down and line those up right there copy paste again we're going to shift and turn bring these over here snap those there copy paste again okay so now you get the idea this is a this is on side of our box before we do any anything else we're going to grab this copy and paste now for this one we're going to select this whole thing we're going to come over here we're going to go to weld and hit weld now we have our finger joints okay on this other side we want to do something else first so these are all grouped we want to shift select all of these guys and we want to group them one more time okay now this is important you want to grab the big Square first and then shift grab the little ones and then you're going to come over here and you're going to hit subtract so if you look at this now let's just make this a different color so you can see it now that we've got both of these edited if you bring this one over see how the slides right in there kind of reminds me of your mom and then of course you would have to edit additional sides to the box but you guys get the idea right okay and this ends your tutorial on how to put things in the slot so you can just feel free to stick things in my slot all right guys here's our little MDF box when I put it together it the curf was a little tight on it I did end up using a mallet this is friction fit there's no glue in here so you want to experiment with your curf to make sure because especially when you get these these bigger joints these deeper joints you're going to have less play in there than when you have thinner material like when I cut this at a/2 inch material I ended up dropping my curve measurement down to 0.04 mm all right internet come over here have a seat on the lap okay now if you like this video do me a favor hit that like button if you want to see more videos like this hit that subscribe button and click on there's probably a video around here that you may want to check out but at the end of the day I want you to remember who taught you all about boxtoday we're going to talk about making perfect finger joints with your laser what's up guys I'm Nick and this is build dad build and today it's all about that box today we're going to be making finger joints with our laser why are we doing it with the laser well for a couple of reasons one to cut these in a wood shop you need to create yourself a jig a lot of times you need a special blade either a d stack or a flat top single blade you're going to need some tools you may not have like like a table saw or a router and I've seen a lot of people have confusion on how to cut so basically when you cut one side then you have to cut the mating side and I think you flip the piece over on your table saw I I don't know but it's a pain in the ass using a laser you're going to get even Cuts all the way across there's little room for human error if you set everything upu right and the biggest thing you need to understand about finger joints when you're working on the laser is curf we'll get to that in just a second now I will give you a couple of cons for doing finger joints on a laser one of them is you are kind of limited on how thick a material you can cut this is half inch this was done on 100 watt CO2 once you get over about 3/4 of an inch you start getting a little bit of an angle to your cut because your laser is going back out of focus you can't help this with different focal lengths sometimes but but in my experience material under 3/4 of an inch is about what you can get away with on a laser the size you can cut maybe Limited by the framework of your laser if you're using a diode using a CO2 it may be limited to your bad size I won't be working on anything really big today but I will be using the AP laser downstairs and the AP laser does have the open architecture where you can just drop the bed out of the way and run whatever material whatever size through there so when you get up into the more professional commercial grade lasers you run into less of that problem we will be cutting our finger joints on a CO2 laser today but you can use a dial Laser your settings are obviously just going to be different however with the CO2 you can cut thicker material faster you'll see an example of this at the end of the video but before we can get into building our boxes we need to talk about curve now you may have heard of curf before or maybe not curf in woodworking is usually the width of the blade so if you drew a line on a piece of wood and you and you cut directly on that line the width of your table saw blade or your miter saw blade or whatever is going to cut a little material on either side of that line so usually in woodworking if you want to get an exact measurement you're going to cut to the far side of that line because the material you remove is going to mess up your measurement now you have the same thing with the laser it's the beam size it's much smaller than it would be with a blade but it still exists so first we need to figure out what that measurement is so we can add that measurement to the size of the joints of our box so it'll fit together correctly all right cupcakes let's figure out what our curf is so I like to use this generator it's just a little bit more straightforward for curf I feel I'll link this down below but O2 creative. co.nz is the generator that I use for a lot of different Power grids because it gives you kind of an example what it's going to look like and then if you come down here you can adjust it and we have a curve generator right here go ahead and click on that and this is going to show us how to find the curve for your laser okay so we're going to be working on this top row here this is two different ways to figure out your curve one you can get pieces that fit together two you can get these little circles to see if they fit in the holes or we're going to start out with .5 mm and we're going to go to positive .5 mm and we're going to step it up by 0.1 mm at a time we're going to set our cut setting the cut setting is going to cut these out the label is going to engrave the numbers on here so you don't get these mixed up now I'm using a 100 watt CO2 laser my material is quarter inch MDF so these settings are going to be for my machine you may have to adjust these for yours but my cut power is going to be 85% and we're going to go 22 I'm sorry 20 millimet per second for our label power we're going to go 30% and we're going to go 130 millimet per second okay so I'm going to generate lightburn file that is going to give me this file right here as you can see I've done this a couple time so now we're going to just take this file drop it into lightburn and load it into the laser and this is what the test is going to look like in lightburn now I'm going to take these down to the Easy Bake Oven and we are going to get to a laser in okay so here's our first curve test over here we went ne5 to positive point5 let's come over here don't pay attention to these yet and I'll show you what we found out this is negative .5 for obviously for what we're doing we're not going to deal in the negatives but this gives you a good idea of if you have too little curf that it gets loose this would be a better task for when you're trying to work with curf offset but we're not going to get into that today and then we got our 0 five which is obviously way too tight look at that it can't even get in the crass it can't get in the crack baby that's your home are you too good for your home it just doesn't fit this would mean that the beam of our laser is5 mm wide which is huge so in doing the first test I came up with our 0.0 Z is a little loose if you can see that it doesn't quite grab and our 0.1 is pretty tight if you can hear that pull apart it's tight so I went ahead and ran a second test where I tested 0.00 all the way through 0.10 at the hundreds of a millimeter so this first one is 0.01 and as you can see that's still kind of loose as we get to about five actually that's still that's still decently loose does grab a little bit but not a whole lot it doesn't have that gorilla grip if you know what I'm talking about once we get down to about seven this is a good joint for if we want to glue it because we want it to we want it to fit in there good we want it to have enough give that a little glue will get in these kvases and give us that sticky icky if you know what I mean if you know what I mean give me some sticky icky now if you want a straight friction fit and I mean like that true gorilla gripper then you're probably want to go want to go more with a 0.10 um as you can see that this is that's that's tight that's tight if that's too tight if you can't get your joints together when they're real small uh then you might want to drop it down to a 09 but today we are going to be using the 0.07 for two reasons one because it's d07 right H and two like I said it's just got a little bit of give so we can get a little bit of glue in there because we're going to glue our box together today but now that we've discovered our curf we're going to go upstairs and we're going to use this number to figure out how to make our boxes welcome back cupcakes now that we know what our curf is we can go ahead and start making our box first thing we're going to do is use an online generator these are normally for someone who isn't going to be making a lot of boxes maybe you just need to make a box for like a oneoff or something like that and you don't really want to learn how to create them manually I suest using one of these generators for the first few boxes that you make just so you can get an idea of what they should look like in lightburn there's a bunch of different box generators online I'll link these down below you've got maker Design Lab you've got maker case you've got boxes. py and this is what I used to use but lately it's been kind of nonresponsive it takes a long time for stuff to generate but I've kind of started using cuddle a little bit more now because you can see your your box as you design it so today we're going to be using cuddle fair warning cuddle has a free version and a paid version the free version allows you to make five projects a month if you're going to be making more projects then you need to upgrade to the pro version to start with cuddle you're going to have to come in and create an account I'm already signed in you don't need to put in any credit card information or anything like that for the free version come to templates scroll down to laser cut box so just the open box with finger joints click on that one of the big things I like about this is you can see as you change your box so if we want this to be 8 in instead of four you'll see a change in the preview window here also if you're not sure exactly what to do there's a video tutorial right here there's also written directions on how to assemble it the default is inches but we're going to switch everything to millimeters just so we can be consistent with our other box that we'll be making okay so our width is going to be 200 our depth is going to be 200 and our height is going to be 200 so we have a just a square box here next we're going to be using quarter inch material so we're going to change this to 6.35 and then our curace we've already figured out is 0.07 here you can turn the labels off if you don't want them to be obviously labeled and then you can go ahead and download this from here or you can come up and use their editor and this is where you can customize your project a little bit better and now I can come in here and each one of these is editable so the front if I hit front then it's just going to pull up that one piece and let's say I don't want this here so I'm going to take that off or if you want to put a hole in the middle of those for whatever reason or something like that you can drag and drop different shapes we can delete that let's you could put text on here you can put text on here and say box or you could just do like an emoji which is what we're going to do we'll go ahead and put a smiley face on there just for funsies okay but once we're done editing this you just come up to file you can export it as an SVG a PDF a PNG or a dxf file we going to export it as an SVG now what we'll do is we'll just open up lightburn so you guys can see what this looks like in lightburn that's what it's going to look like and then you can edit this from here so you can definitely take these and set the cut lines and then of course to do the smiley face we just come in here to the The Fill layer all right cupcakes we are back in lightburn so this is how to do more customizable finger joints if you're going to be making a lot of boxes I would suggest you learn how to do it in light bur it's always easier to build something in lightburn and then send it to your laser then build it someplace else bring it into light bur that's just one more step that that could cause some sort of error or inconsistency so this one involves some setup and understanding how lightburn works this is a brief overview of Louisiana hobby guys video I suggest you check out Rich's video for a more in-depth explanation on exactly how this works I will link his video down below basically you're going to come into your setup and what you want to do is I already have all these set you want your visual grid spacing to be 10 mm we're working in millimeters by the way grid snap distance 10 click selection tolerance 1 object snap distance 10 down here for control Arrow you want to switch this to 5 mm and for just the arrow you want to switch it to 10 this all sets up your work area to be divisible by five and working on a 10 mm grid things will snap to grid better for you so make sure to have snap to grid selected once you have all that set up now we want an equally dividable Square so let's go 200 mm again hold shift pull that out make sure our lock is engaged change this to 200 mm if you grab it by the center you'll see how it snaps to the grid line so if I pop it right here you'll notice that if you count these squares there is 20 squares there so each one is 10 mm I'm going to take another Square I'm going to pull it out and then let's make this 40x40 for the time being we want our tabs to be 40 m M wide and I'm just making these tabs kind of huge so you can see how this works a little bit better normally you'd want to do something more like a 20 millimeter wide or maybe even a 10 depending on the fingers you want and I'm going to pull this up so you guys can see this okay so our material is 6.35 MM thick we double that to 12.7 mm then our curve is 07 we want to double that so that's .14 we we add all that together and we come up with a thickness of 12.84 we're going to change our height to 12.84 so our width is going to stay the same our height is basically double what our thickness plus curf is so what we want to do is grab this and we're going to bring this over here and as you see it kind of snaps right on that line and we're going to find the center and we're just going to put it right there so we have thickness plus curve on one side and thickness plus curve on the other side that's the reason we're doubling everything so that's the benefit of of setting all of this up initially is so these will all snap into place so I'm going to copy paste bring this over here I want I don't want to go right on the edge because they they'll overlap I'm going to copy paste go right over here this is one side of a portion of our box what I'm going to do is grab these all three of them and group them and then I'm going to copy them paste them and I'm going to bring this guy down and line those up right there copy paste again we're going to shift and turn bring these over here snap those there copy paste again okay so now you get the idea this is a this is on side of our box before we do any anything else we're going to grab this copy and paste now for this one we're going to select this whole thing we're going to come over here we're going to go to weld and hit weld now we have our finger joints okay on this other side we want to do something else first so these are all grouped we want to shift select all of these guys and we want to group them one more time okay now this is important you want to grab the big Square first and then shift grab the little ones and then you're going to come over here and you're going to hit subtract so if you look at this now let's just make this a different color so you can see it now that we've got both of these edited if you bring this one over see how the slides right in there kind of reminds me of your mom and then of course you would have to edit additional sides to the box but you guys get the idea right okay and this ends your tutorial on how to put things in the slot so you can just feel free to stick things in my slot all right guys here's our little MDF box when I put it together it the curf was a little tight on it I did end up using a mallet this is friction fit there's no glue in here so you want to experiment with your curf to make sure because especially when you get these these bigger joints these deeper joints you're going to have less play in there than when you have thinner material like when I cut this at a/2 inch material I ended up dropping my curve measurement down to 0.04 mm all right internet come over here have a seat on the lap okay now if you like this video do me a favor hit that like button if you want to see more videos like this hit that subscribe button and click on there's probably a video around here that you may want to check out but at the end of the day I want you to remember who taught you all about box\n"