Flower girl gift box

My cousin is getting married and wanted a small gift box for her flower girl, a 5 year old who loves fairies. This is what I came up with. Used a 3/4" bottom cleaning bit, 1/8" sq EM, 1/4" sq EM, 90° v-bit, 30° v-bit, 3/16" dowel, 3/4" oak

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That is great! Would you mind sharing the files? My daughter would love this!

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This project was… difficult. But I learned a lot from it. I don’t think sharing the file with you would do you much good as the parts as they came off the CNC were not exactly assembly ready… lots of sanding and modification to get it to work. This was the second attempt at this box, the first one I scrapped completely. I’ll share with you the things I learned and you can give it a try.

The heart shape I made using this tutorial from @eciramella Draw a basic heart

Tink was just an image I pulled off the net, used a 30deg bit to trace on the line to a depth of 1/16"

It’s very important for getting the layers to fit together than your stock be absolutely flat, so I had to level both sides.

I used 3/16" dowel in locator holes to keep it all together

I use the tape/CA glue method for holding most projects down. I learned that doesn’t work well when the shape you’re cutting out is only 3/8" wide. Future projects I’ll use tabs to keep it all in place.

My original design 0.375" walls, and I figured using 0.17" offsets for the lip would be enough. Not so much. A lot of sanding was needed to get it to fit together. 0.035" was clearly not enough space to allow it to fit. For future projects I would probably go as much as 0.1 offsets instead. A square lid probably wouldn’t need as much of a lip, but where this is a curved shape I think you need to allow for much more room.

When you test fit it all together, there will be differences between the layers. Those are fixed with simple sanding. Do that AFTER you glue it together. I did it before, and it was perfect… after I glued it I had to sand again, and there’s not much room for error. If you look close at the bottom point of the heart, you can see the alignment dowel showing through because I had to sand it so much.

Let me know if you want the Aspire file for this… but I honestly think you’ll be better off starting from scratch using some of the tips above.

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A further concern here is that Disney is quite protective of its copyrights and trademarks.

It’s arguably okay for an individual to recreate an image for a persona project, it becomes a potential problem legally to pass out files with trademarked or copyrighted materials.

Many of Andrew Lang’s fairy tale books were illustrated and are now out of copyright — might be you could find a suitable image there: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Lang%2C%20Andrew%2C%201844-1912

@ShallowCreekHill — if you have any difficulties working up a project from those notes, let us know, either here or at support@carbide3d.com and we’ll do our best to help.

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I’m glad you found that useful!

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It never would have occured to me to draw a heart in such a simple way without you taking the time to create the tutorial. I appreciate the effort.

Thanks for the details. I don’t have Aspire yet but am sure i can do this with VCarve. Just hoping to skip the design steps.

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No worries! It’s kinda how I’ve seen the world since I was a child (what basic shapes make up more complex objects). I’m blown away by some really complex 3D modeling because of this.

Also, there are a number of ways you could have completed this task. In my example, the heart is very square. However, if you start with the square and two circles, then connect from one edge of the circle to the point of the square, and then from that point to the other edge with the curved line, you can make a steeper pointed heart.

I like these options because it gives me full control.

Another way to make a heart is to just draw a heart in inkscape or import a heart SVG.

Shrug.

If there are OTHER things you’d like help with, feel free to DM me!

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