Heart Box – Cherry with Bora Bora Blue
Update: Available for sale on my store: Corbin’s Workshop or Etsy: Box on Etsy
I thought it would be fun to add a lid to my heart bowls and turn it into a box. The original heart bowl design didn’t really lend itself to becoming a box, so I decided to redesign the shape from the ground up.
I modeled it up in CAD via Fusion 360 using a pure parametric design and bezier curves. My first heart box I based off of some curves I drew and formed the shape in the “mesh” section of the CAD program. This made it more difficult to tweak the shape after I created it, as the mesh was a typical 3D model. By using parameters and curves, I could go back and edit the shape to tweak some features. This makes it a lot more flexible for modifications, and came in handy later on.
I encountered some problems when making the first prototype. The lid didn’t fit well, and I kind of expected that to happen. I designed it to fit with zero tolerance, but this never works in real life — in particular with wood or epoxy. Usually you have to make one of the pieces slightly smaller to make it fit right. For the prototype, I just hand sanded down the lid until it fit, but that was rather time consuming and left a few marks on the underneath lip of the lid.
I didn’t find that acceptable, so I created a prototype lid out of some scrap wood and modified some of the cutting parameters until it easily fit without too much trouble.
The prototype has rather thick walls. Lexi, my wife, thought it would look better if it was more petite. Luckily, this wasn’t too hard to modify due to the way I created the design, so I went back and made the walls a bit thinner. I also took out more material from the lid to make it a bit lighter and easier to remove.
I struggled with finding a good way to remove the lid. Initially I wanted it to slide off to the side, and snap shut with magnets. I ordered some small magnets and planned to do this, but I realized that even the smallest magnets would not fit in the small tapered edge of the lid. I experimented with different concepts on how to make it easy to remove the lid, but I didn’t want anything that interrupted the basic heart shape. So, I settled on replication of the profile and made a small grabber in the middle. It works, but it could be better.
I have a bunch of footage of me making this box…eventually I’ll make a video for YouTube!
[…] first heart box, Cherry with Bora Bora Blue, was a prototype that turned out awesome. However, I felt like there were ways to improve things, […]
[…] the last few posts I shared some photos of my heart box. The first prototype one was made from cherry wood with Bora Bora blue epoxy and the second pair was made with purple tinted […]