I was making a box to store some lighting-related stuff. The idea was to cut foam inlays for the box to hold the bits. I was actually working on this box concurrently with my recent
gaming accessory box, and so it was part of the same batch of experiments (such as using the same batch of resin for the inlay). However I somehow made a mistake when programming the G-code and only made it 3cm deep instead of the intended 5cm deep, and I didn't even realise it until I was cutting the foam. So I decided to use it to store some of my nicer pens that don't have their own proper box instead.
From left: Noodler's Konrad Dixie No. 10 Methuselah, FPR Himalaya green ebonite, FPR Himalaya amethyst purple acrylic, Parker 51, Omas 361, Pilot Elite, Lamy Scribble, Aurora 98 Archivi Storici, Rotring Esprit retractable graphite, Pilot Decimo dark grey.
I was using the leftover 20mm foam from when I made a foam insert for a
statue. I thought it would be cool to have a protective piece of foam actually attached to the lid rather than have one sit on top of the contents, so I inlet a large pocket inside the lid. Unfortunately the plywood I was using was just over 5mm thick, and with the resin inlay on the outside I was afraid to cut out too much incase the lid became too flimsy, so I only cut the pocket for the foam to a little under 3mm deep. Which is quite thin, but still probably enough foam to protect the contents?
I glued in a sheet of foam, and then trimmed it flush on my hot wire cutter.
Since the box interior was 30mm deep and I was using 20mm thick foam, I had to actually slice one piece in half, down to around 10mm thick, to make up the 30mm thickness. This would be the bottom piece. I did this by sandwitching it between two pieces of wood, marking the line I wanted to cut, standing the wood-foam-wood sandwitch on it's side, and carefully running it along the fence on the hot wire table while trying to keep it upright so the wire would cut a consistent thickness.
I found that the foam insert in the lid actually catches slightly on the foam inside the box, creating resistance to closing. In fact the lid tends to "bounce back" after closing, leaving it open by a few mm. It can be rather hard to get it to fully close. Initially this was MUCH worse; it was hard to close at all and impossible to get it to stay completely closed. But I cut the inner piece of foam a bit lower and now it's much better, but still annoying. I'm not sure what the best solution is, perhaps I can find a way to cut the lid insert to be slightly thinner than the recess, or I just need to cut the body inserts to a bit lower.
I printed a template for the cutouts for the main piece of foam. I cut the inner pieces out of the template, then pinned the template to the foam with tailor pins.
I then cut out the pieces of foam on my wire cutter. This was a little fiddly as I had left very little material for the walls, so the whole block lost it's structural strength very quickly, making it harder to manouver across the wire cutting table.
I probably got too greedy and tried to fit in too many pens. The wood is also probably too thin, and annoyingly the lid is slightly bowed out - I really want to use solid, stabilized wood in the future, but that's a lot of work and I'm not really set up to process wood properly. Well, overall this box came out OK and it's nice to have a better storage solution for some of my pens.
