I didn’t start out with a plan. First I did a test cut.
I calculated how to compensate for kerf in the finger sizes, and came up with this design:
I tried to engrave a picture of my girlfriend’s dog on the sides of the box, but it looked kind of janky. Oh well. I found out later I could have used posterize instead of threshold to capture more grays. I thought the engraving just had a single depth for given set of parameters, didn’t know it could do different levels in a single job. I scaled the smaller design up and added a checkerboard engraving:
I reduced the depths of the fingers so they’ll remain flush with the 1/8″ plywood and did the kerf calculation again for the new scale. This one didn’t fit together as well, but a bit of glue brought it together. I cut out some acrylic lids for the boxes and engraved some faces that I drew in illustrator.
I did some measurements in Illustrator to see why the box didn’t fit together. As I suspected, one of the tenons on the bottom panel was not centered:
