The Squirrel has had laser cut parts for a while but the motorstick was made using legacy equipment until last Sunday (Sept 16, 2012). The old system worked so well that it wasn’t believed that the laser would be better. The legacy machine is ready for maintenance so I decided to give laser a try.

After a few experiments I discovered that the laser worked much better than I expected. The parts are a bit straighter and accurate. I believe they are stronger. I was even able to use some softer wood which seemed too weak when cut on the legacy machine.

I had to add break-off tabs since the motor sticks were falling into the machine. The rest of the Squirrel uses 1/16″ slats to prevent parts from falling so with the part thickness it comes to 1/8″ from the cutting grid. So laser doesn’t have to be refocused when switching between Squirrel parts and the 1/8″ motorsticks.

As you may know shipping boxes for Squirrels are made from discarded cardboard. This is more fun that it looks. 🙂 First the boxes are cut. You can see the “Box-O-Matic” cutter in action on the environment page. The boxes are then glued together, stuffed, labelled and taped. Scrap from the cutting process are cut into strips and are used to make the new “flat boxes“. So even the recovered cardboard isn’t wasted.

Here’s the new “20 box”. I think it can hold as much as 30 Squirrels. This one is made in two parts. It needs a lot of improvement. I haven’t worked on it much since here is often a box I can re-use as-is for orders 20 and up. So most of the box making surrounds smaller orders. I’ve got a lot of box sizes and designs but there are four that come forward the most. They are called “The Flat”, “The Three (Zen)”, “The Ten” and “The Twenty”. Flat is used from 1-3 units, Three up to 10, Ten up to 15 and Twenty up to 30.

I’ve been using all sorts of glue. In the picture below is School Glue which is 15/gallon. Carpenter glue is about 25/gallon. I’m curious if I cut the carpenter glue with water if it would work as well.

Taping is the final stage. I use the clear packing tape and am keeping my eyes peeled for something cheaper or easier.

There might not be enough savings here to justify too much experiment but I’m curious if anybody else is making boxes. Any suggestions?