Bruce Viney's "Little Box" for Laser Cutters by mbourgon

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

(Updated 2/2/2020 - Bruce has, unfortunately, passed away since I originally posted these, and the site with the actual INSTRUCTIONS for it has since gone away. HOWEVER, I was able to find them with the Internet Wayback Machine, and I've added the PDF with the original instructions. I'd like to think Bruce would have liked that.)
A basic adaptation of Bruce Viney's free "Little Box" Puzzle Box. 10 moves to unlock and open! A really clever little box. (more plans of his at www.homemadepuzzles.co.uk).
All that I've done is convert it to Inkscape to make cutting the pieces easier by using a laser cutter. I have NOT gone through the effort (yet?) of changing from dowels to cutting 1x1x3s, so you'll need a dowel (I used 3/16") and a matching drill-bit. It's a little wasteful on wood, since I didn't understand why some of the pieces were the way they are, and I couldn't get it to fit on (2) 24x12" pieces of wood.
(To import into Corel: make a new document, hit File->Import, then hit "enter")
To make, cut the 3 pages out on 1/4" plywood (see below if you're not using 1/4"), get a drill-bit, matching dowel and small saw (to cut the dowel), and follow along with his directions. There's a lot of "hurry up then wait for glue to dry", but this assembles in a couple of hours. (Note that the key-looking "middle spacer" gets glued down as well). The only problem I ran into was needing to sand down some edges. The tolerances can be REALLY tight and the burned edges (from the laser) have more friction than standard wood-on-wood.
IMPORTANT: Bruce's "T-Plans" make everything a multiple of the thickness of the wood - if you don't match, it will not work without substantial sanding and cleanup.
I used 1/4" marking but did a scale to 80%, then cut on .2", aka 5mm, wood.
All credit to Bruce Viney for designing this! My only contribution is making it on a laser. (Note: there's one extra piece, 17x2 - it's because I misread originally the (2) 17x12 pieces)