Would a Shapeko be suitable to make wooden boxes?

I’m looking at making a series of wooden boxes to send to my clients.

Would the S3 be able to handle this?

How deep an item can fit in it?

Thank you,

Hannah

Yes. Lots of folks make lots of boxes of various sorts.

The work area is ~3" high, and the XL and XXL have a bit more reach than that and one can clamp awkward things to the front of the machine for more flexibility.

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You could potentially also cut box sides/top/bottom including rabbets for things to fit together if you wanted larger/deeper boxes.

Not sure you’d want to try cutting 3 inches deep though. Maybe with a conical cutter? One alternative is cutting layered parts. Another is making bottom, sides, and top, and attaching them.

I am interested to try something like this fold up box: Folding Box

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I’ve made a few boxes in my time - it’s handled them very well.

I usually mill the individual sides separately, rather than milling them from a solid large piece of wood.

@45rpm - I think that would be very cool

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I want to make small ring boxes, only 1.25" tall by 2"x2"

I imagine cutting them out from a single piece wood in the shapes of hearts. How long would this take?

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I do these in maybe 10 minutes I want to say, I’ve been ramping up the speed on them. I need to make some more soon and should time it. They’re similar dimensions to what you’re describing.


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Endmills in 1/4" and 1/8" shank seem to reach 3/4" deep pretty well. Beyond that, you could either carve the sides and bottom separately (using traditional woodworking joining techniques; fingers, rabbets, miters, etc.) or carve in layers like I did on my skull box:

The bottom is 1.25" deep from the lip to the box floor. It’s 2 pieces of 3/4" thick Bloodwood.

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Yep, I’ve made a few boxes as well. Not as cool as @Kopah’s skull one, but I’m working on it.

I have another one in progress, just not sure how to complete it just yet:

I know these aren’t the exact type of boxes you are looking for @45rpm, but they show some different examples.

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Wow, @ItsDan that is the style of box I’m looking to make. Did you use carbide to make them?

I did the initial sketches in Illustrator where it can be a bit easier to do more complex shapes, I then brought it into Carbide Create to setup the milling.

I just had a chance to make some more, each of these 4 boxes took 15 minutes to carve, that’s pretty optimized but doing small layers because there’s 2 deep thin pockets that were leaving poor edges and these settings minimize that.

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