Custom Birch Plywood Boxes
Custom birch plywood boxes are made on-demand in any volume you require at CNCROi.com, this order was for a few hundred of them, all laser engraved and cut to spec.
There is quite a lot of work prototyping and testing something as simple as a custom birch plywood box, the last thing you want is to make a few hundred then find-out that they don’t form a box easily or some parts or missing or of the wrong size.
My relationship with plywood and CNCs goes back many many years when I use to design kids toys using this material and sold the plans around the world before CNCROi.com was even a thought over at my “now” placeholder site CNCKing.com.
I’m entirely self-taught for everything I do, so it’s been a very gradual evolution of my skills and equipment through the years to get CNCROi.com to the point it is now.
The reason for laser engraving first followed by cutting is so everything is a precise and accurate as possible by keeping things a full sheet as long as possible.
You will notice during the cutting process that sometimes sheet warp, this isn’t from the heat of the laser, it’s actually stresses in the birch plywood that get released or relaxed as the laser cuts through them, they don’t really affect the overall finished box because these tolerances are built-into the design and process itself by CNCROi.com.
This is definitely not the first box I’ve ever made, I’ve made endless amounts of boxes of various sizes and specs through the years, the most of which are for my other business TeaLightBox.com.
Custom birch plywood boxes can be made by CNCROi.com in any size, quantity, thickness, wood species or material such as stainless steel to Corian at our shop.
The absolute precision of our machine and processes means that each of the custom birch plywood boxes are identical, first to several hundred later, last and as we make essentially one at a time, it also means we can customize boxes on the fly so they don’t all need to be identical such as these ones were.
If the boxes would have required thicker material, CNCROi.com also has two CNC routers to cut out thicker plywood or materials that the laser isn’t optimized for and furthermore, we also have metal cutting capabilities in our shop so your options are endless.
Whether our CNC laser is cutting holes out or rectangles, they are all dead-on accurate, the holes all have the same diameter, the holes are perfect circles and best of all, our machine doesn’t need a break, it’s built and does industrial production any time of day or night… even continuously such as these custom birch plywood boxes.
There were MANY sheets cut into boxes during this extended production run of custom birch plywood boxes, the material is top quality, good on both sides and the material thickness is 1/8″ thick so it has some good strength and esthetic qualities to it for this specific application.
The most fun box I’ve made was the box prop from the Hellraiser movie series, it was great fun to make!
There are endless varieties of plywood available, not only birch but cherry, oak, maple and so forth.
Laser engraving uses the same amount of power as laser cutting, the only difference is speed, go slower, get through the material, go faster and you end-up less deep, so it’s pretty straight forward when it came to making these custom birch plywood boxes which requires both processes.
The bright light you see is the instant vaporization of the birch plywood under the laser head, you don’t see this with routers because it uses a bit rather than photons but you do see the same with CNCROi.com‘s plasma cutter, where in that instant, it’s a plasma gas vaporizing the metal.
The way I optimized the sheets for this project of cutting hundreds of custom birch plywood boxes was that each one produced three units exactly, this makes production easier because you don’t have to account for an extra or missing part to complete an entire box.
Of course, CNCROi.com can also make boxes out of aluminum, and weld them as well using stainless steel and mild steel.
The esthetic the customer was looking for was perfect for this material and the application, a nice burned look along the edges and engravings, if they didn’t want this, then we would have just masked all the surfaces but the burning was a nice little detail to add to the grain of the plywood to give it a more interesting look.
Laser cutting can be a slow process over engraving, but this project used relatively thin material so production went pretty fast through the hundreds of custom birch plywood boxes, if these would have been half inch thick rather than an eighth, CNCROi.com‘s router would have done a faster job cutting them out.
There was a lot of smoke produced during the cutting of all these hundreds of custom birch plywood boxes, luckily, CNCROi.com has a powerful vacuum system taking care of that as it’s produced and the smell of birch was everywhere in the shop as well, which is a very nice smell to come into work with.
There are many ways to make boxes, some are easier to assemble than others.
This is what a typical half sheet looks like, you can see there is very little wasted space, I could have nested things tighter but it wasn’t required for this production run.
Below you can see stacks of parts for each box, each custom birch plywood box was made-up of 10 pieces, the customer will be gluing these together after assembly, though they do friction fit rather nicely as well.
Keep in mind this is only one part of the production that was produced, as I had enough, I’d pack them up and stick them in boxes for shipping, so I never saw the entire production of all the boxes in one shot but I can say there was about 200 pounds of custom birch plywood boxes shipped from CNCROi.com!
The scraps look great too, those will be chopped-up and sent to the fire pit to keep the outdoors warm on cold winter nights.
Need custom boxes? Contact CNCROi.com right now!