I’m getting ready to start laser cutting the packaging inserts for shipping my Litch chessboards (5x V3 prototypes arrive THIS WEEK… cross your fingers! Trying to drop 100 on the holiday season by the end of October). I need to cut double thickness cardboard for the corner pieces (roughly 3x3" with a small cutout in the middle, folds halfway on a scored cut), used 4x inside a 12x12x3" box from Uline. And single thickness cardboard for U shaped tunnels with little cutouts for the extra queen and the duck… (wink)… and a sort of H piece to go between them on top of the chessboard. I’m describing all this because I don’t have pictures of it from inside CAD yet… I will be doing that part in the next 24 hours or so.
Basically, I would love to meet or talk to any of you that have ever designed cardboard packaging and have experience laser cutting or using other manufacturing processes available for small numbers like I need at the moment.
And, if you’ve cut cardboard on Tarkin and have experience you want to share, I would really appreciate it. Obviously, cardboard is tricky to laser cut for a lot of reasons, but it is possible and I am hoping someone can give me a running start and understand the risks and avoid them as much as possible.
Thank you so much for reading!
Attached are some pictures of my packaging material for my Foxie Clock 2.0, all of which I designed in mid 2022 (EXCEPT for the U-Line box! haha! That wasn’t mine. Clever though). I need some people to drop some knowledge on me!
Oh, I also want to engrave a pattern on the cardboard, good enough to be read as a QR code and a few large text characters. I’m not sure of the best way to do this on cardboard or how much contrast there can be. Ideas? Obviously, as little engraving as possible is ideal, so these will be maybe 0.75" or so, at most. If there’s a better way to put a couple of QR codes and a few sentences on some cardboard, repeatably, other than a sticker… I’m all ears.
I’m thinking that engraving the QR code and other text out of focus at higher power to scorch the cardboard might work at a lower detail, and be much faster as well?
I’ve cut moderately thick non-corrugated cardboard without trouble on Dorian. The edges are definitely blackened and the pieces had a burned smell as a result. The kerf was larger than I expected, which was bad for my project.
Corrugated cardboard may be trickier. In theory, you just have to find the right power and speed, but the amount of material you have to cut to go completely through varies with the corrugation. The components are thinner and thus will burn even more, perhaps even posing a fire risk.
You won’t know until you try, but I am skeptical that you will like the result for this application.
I’m prepared to experiment. I’ve found texanbox (dot) com and they sell large cardboard sheets very inexpensively (4x8’ in both single and double corrugated sheets for $7 and $14ish) … that’s pretty cheap to cut into 2x4’ and then experiment with… a lot. once I get it, I can cut a ton of them from exactly the same kind of cardboard using slightly stronger power to cover the variance in all of them. Thanks a ton for your reply!
Cutting corrugated cardboard or corrugated plastic sign board (Coroplast) is pretty far from ideal due to the internal air gap preventing a continuous channel from forming. It does still cut ok, better than it should by my logic but I’m not complaining.
Your best bet may indeed be out of focus marking. Still, tricky. And specifically for QR codes, this may come up- say you have 1mm wide QR pixels, and your out-of-focus cutting widens the swath so you go with a 0.4mm line interval.
Lightburn has to resample that into evenly spaced raster lines. Some QR code rows of pixels will line up so they have 2 raster lines burning those pixels, but some will have 3 lines. There might be some techniques to help fix that if it doesn’t work but they might get complicated. Or I could be overthinking it and it may not matter at all.
I cut a ton of corrugated cardboard back in the day with inserts like your doing. You can get the settings dialed in without the edges being burnt at all with just a bit of trial and error.
For Engraving I like to do vector engraving for contrast. you can get raster dialed in too but it’s much less contrast. and different batches of cardboard produce a different effect
I did it on the old lasers So I don’t have much settings suggestions. just pretty low power and fast.
Some initial results today from some single-ply cardboard look quite good! This is definitely going to work. Exciting! It’s surprising how much fun it is to engineer packaging
Thought y’all might like these pics of my current packaging design (a bit overdone, I’m sure, but I always optimize after holding it in my hands)… going to be laser cutting my tests of these later today, with the actual single/double ply cardboard from TexanBox. And my V3 PCBs are arriving today!!! SendCutSend is a bit behind with the other parts… sigh.
