LP Record Box

We purchased a full sheet of underlayment (5mm) from Home Depot. We cut it down to project boards at about 14 inches square. For this project you need three of these boards: 1 for the left side, 1 for the right side, and 1 for the top, bottom and back.

We designed the box using the website https://www.festi.info/boxes.py/index.html (often referred to as Boxes.py). You don't need to do this if you use the included .xcs files. If you use a different thickness of wood or want a different sized box you can create your own. For this project we just used “Boxes | ABox - A simple Box”.

We designed our box using the following values for the inside measurement:

• x - 12.5
• y - 2.5
• h - 12.5

We setup the box using “inside” measurements that were slight bigger than a sampling of our records that we measured. You should check the records you plan to store to ensure our measurements will work for you. You may want to consider changing the “h” (height) if you are planning to store multi-album records (3 LP or more) as we have found these to be wider.

We made our box about 2.5 wide (the “y” on Boxes.py) and it holds about 12 single album records comfortably.

We created a snowflake design with a box to add wording. It is included in this How-To and you are welcome to use it and add your own words, or add your own design to personalize the box.

Now you can setup your xTool Creative Space project (or other) to cut the box.

The setting we used were:

• for the words and snowflake - 250 mm/s at 80% power 1 pass (xTool D1 Pro 20w)
• for cutting the box - 6 mm/s at 100% power 3 passes

We recommend testing your setting on scrap material to ensure they work for your wood and laser and adjust your setting based on your test results.

We found that wiping the edges of the wood reduces the carbon buildup and how dirty you get the rest of the project. We do this right after taking each piece off of the laser.

Assemble the box without glue to ensure that everything lines up and fits correctly.

Lay out the pieces next to each other with the joints interlocked, but laying flat. You can put on some painters masking tape next to where you will be gluing to reduce the mess from overflowing glue.

We've included a picture of another project we masked off using the tape - don't get confused here it is a more complex box than this record box!

We used Gorilla Super Glue Brush & Nozzle (see picture) and found that brushing the joints to be assembled was much cleaner that using other glues as we have in the past on other projects.

Quickly assemble the project (if using super glue), and hold or clamp to get good glue joints. 

We did not put any finish on this project (yet) but have used stains, paints, and polyurethane on other projects and plan to finish this one with red and green (as it is for our Christmas albums).