Heart Box – Cherry Wood Box with Purple and Ghost Blue
The 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, especially when my wife gave me some invaluable feedback. She felt like the lid was too heavy and the box was a bit thick.
These are photos of boxes #2 and #3. They are virtually identical, and feature a slightly more petite inner wall, which actually gives a bit more storage room inside the box. I modified the heart shape just slightly to be a little thicker on one portion of the lid, and then thinned out the lid by removing material on the bottom. I also made the “heart grabber” larger to make it easier to lift off. My machining operations also in-cut the lid a bit to make it have a better fit directly off the machine.
I’m not sure how many more of these I’ll make, and currently it is just the three. They are more time consuming to make compared to the basic “heart bowl” that I have been producing, and obviously take more materials and machining time to create the lid and box. I am currently charging $220 for them (available on Corbin’s Workshop or Etsy) with free shipping, whereas I am doing $200 for my Heart Bowls. It’s not a big difference in price, but I feel like they are already really expensive, and I don’t want to charge some crazy amounts for them. In reality, I would need to charge more for them, given the amount of time they take me to make. I also got my electric bill for last month, and it is double what it normally would be — around $400 compared to the normal $200. This is probably because I’ve been running my CNC machine nearly constantly during my awake hours, and it is showing up in my bill. I know $200/month is already high, but that is largely due to charging our electric car at home.
A note on Etsy: They charge a 7% fee on all sales, so my stuff is more expensive over there. They will also add a 15% advertising fee on top of that, if they sell your item from one of their own ads on other networks (ie: Google, Facebook, etc). Luckily I could disable that option, as I really can’t afford to sell my products at a 22% discount. These fees are on top of the the PayPal fees, so what I end up getting is even less. And that free shipping, isn’t really free :). These things are all part of doing business, but it is starting to make me second guess whether or not it is even worthwhile. Part of creation is just doing it because I enjoy it.
[…] In 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 epoxy. […]
[…] up a new CNC machine, and this is one of the first projects I did on it. It is a variation of the epoxy and wood heart boxes I did a while back. I like working with epoxy, but I want to also do some pure wood projects. Wood […]