Adventures in Box Making (part four)

Adventures in Box Making (part three)

I thought some more about Steve comment about strength and about having perfectly scored lines for the aesthetic-worth of the piece. So, I bought a set of router bits for my dremel, some dowel, some black mounting board and some light coloured cardboard. I also bought some wood stain as I felt that I needed a darker, slightly red coloured wood to go with the black board.

I cut the cardboards into the size of the sides I wanted and then glued one piece of the light coloured card to the black card together with spray adhesive.

I then routed the dowel on two sides at around 20 degree angles, to use to join the card sides together. It was my first time routing and inevitably was rough and not even. I did enjoy using the dremel as a router, especially with the little router table I got for it. Yes, I have a problem, I collect gadgets, of all kinds. I like toys.

This was just another mockup to test out an idea and honestly I wasn’t too enamoured with the wood and card combination. There was just something not quite right about it, aesthetically.

I put another quick mockup together of how the heart would fit inside the box, using ply cut into a hexagon shape, metal rods and a resin casting of the heart. Then I added a card wall with the hand-hole  cut out in it so I could get my classmates to test out putting their hand through the hole. This was because I needed to check sizing of the hole against different sized hands to make sure the fingers of large hands could get in while small hands couldn’t get all the way in. This led to the idea of using a barrier that was thin and stretchy to ensure fingers only could get in.

As it turned out, the idea of stitching the card walls to metal rods attached to the box’s ply base and top was an idea I had been playing with as I liked the aesthetic of it. Steve, my tutor, also liked it when he saw the mockup I had done.

I had found my final design.

Adventures in Box Making (The Hiccup)