In many cases I prefer wood as material: it has a warm feeling and with its texture it makes things unique and special. For some time I was thinking about creating a wooden case for eyeglasses as a gift. And here is a first version of it:

The case is made of oak wood, cut with a desktop CNC, with a laser engraved ornament on top. Neodymium magnets keep the to parts together.

Oak Case

20 mm thick oak slabs were used as the base material. These slabs are readily available a local store and easier to handle, and I do have smaller pieces left from other projects, so perfect use of material for me.

Design

To keep the case as small as possible. I needed a picture of the eyeglasses:

This is then used in Inkscape to design the case for it:

This then gets imported into Carbide 3D Create to create the GCode for the CNC machine. The top part is basically a mirror of the bottom part, with the inner lip reduced by 0.1 mm for a smooth fit of the two parts:

Foam Rubber Inlay

To protect the glasses, the inside top and bottom side are covered by a 1 mm foam rubber sheet. I had several colors available.

The sheets then get cut with the laser cutter (15 mm/s, 1% power) in LightBurn, with the design imported from the .svg file.

Two inlays are used: one on the top and one in the bottom part.2×3 magnets keep the two case parts together. The foam rubber inlays get glued into the case after the oiling at the end (see later).

Ornament

Next the top should be kind of special. Because that person loves Gerbera daisies, such a flower has been designed in Inkscape as vector graphic:

Lightburn was used to engrave the ornament, which can import the .svg file from Inkscape:

Several tests were made with different parameters for best result and look on a test piece. The laser power was too high in the first place, but reducing it 0.5% gave good results.

I tried out two variants. One with the outline only, again tested on a scrap piece: Parameters are speed of 10 mm/s with 0.5% power:

The other idea was to use a combination of fill & line which looked good too, with following parameters: line 10 mm/s, 0.5% power, fill 50mm/s, 0.5% power:

The winner was the ‘outline’ version, because it was a more subtle. But I really liked both.

Oil

Finally, the two pieces get a treatment with oak oil:

Result

And here everything finished:

Case for Sunglasses

Here is another case, this time for sunglasses:

Summary

I’m really happy with the process and the result. And with all the steps and design files in place, it is now easy to create new and different ones :-).

Happy Eyeglassing 🙂

Links

• Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/
• LightBurn: https://lightburnsoftware.com/
• Carbide Create: https://carbide3d.com/carbidecreate/