I made these following a “shopping day” of my wife and sister-in-law. As they came back from what was a “modest” shopping spree, they shared what they had bought and all the good bargains, including some incent sticks.
The shop (Selfridges) was displaying the incent in a nice box, but the cost of it was eye-watering. The brand is Fornasetti. The incent itself was quite expensive as well. Selfridges sells the incent for £45 and the box for £145 !, sounds a bit expensive for something that is just going to burn in smoke… So they decided to buy a single set of incent betwen the two of them and did not buy the fancy box.
As I was told the story in the evening, it came to me that I should try to make a “fancy” box myself.
I found a nice picture, similar to the one used on the “real” box and designed a simple box that would fit the size of the incent sticks.
I adjusted the picture for size and converted it to black and white so that it would engrave on the laser machine.
The assembly is very easy as long as you take time to make sure the top will fit appropriately with the bottom. Using wood glue allows for some adjustment time and once sanded the wood grain is beautiful. I have now made a few with a couple of different picture designs and my preferred is the ones that are simply made of plain wood.
This is another project that would be a great school project for kids of all ages. The design of the box on the 3D Cad system is reasonably easy and can be done with free tools like Onshape or others. Most schools will have laser cutters in their main workshop. The amount of wood used for making these boxes is reasonable and you can optimise the space used in the laser to “cut” two boxes at the same time.
For sure, buying a laser cutter to make wooden boxes to avoid buying expensive ones in the shop is not a good business decision…but the skills that you learn are so much more valuable.
