Awsum Heart Box

As the title hints, this is very similar to Awsum55's box.

I liked his laser work and knew then that I'd give it a go to learn new things.

Made from Cherry.

First off and a key feature is the sides. Bending wood is not easy and John used his laser to through-slit some 1/8" BB ply so it would bend while adding some bling.

The bent sides have a junction block where the corners are extreme. This means two bendy strips per box. Each was 12" long x 2" tall.

I replicated his design, but I also cherry veneered the BB plywood first. Cutting the slits was easy with my 10W diode.
An initial test on unveneered 1/8" BB ply showed how flexible it gets,

The sides fit into a groove of the appropriate shape, also laser cut.
This is where I saw some "issues" as the depth of the groove was inconsistent due to the changes in wood hardness.
The groove is about 3/16" deep so plenty of space to put in with epoxy to fill the gaps at the bottom of the groove, but scraping the char from the groove was a bit of a time eater.

Laser groove cut was just waiting for it to finish, but next time I'll just make a template and use the router table to cut.
The 1/8" BB ply was just over a true 1/8" with the veneered faces, so I ordered some 1/4" shaft 1/8" bits. I can make the template slot wide enough so I can borrow some shaft guide bearings from other bits and get the correct groove width.

I didn't want to spend a lot of time cleaning away the char on the edges of the cherry top/bottom which I laser cut so I made router templates a tad smaller so I could remove the black with a template router bit.

Now to figure out what to do with a bunch of tiny hearts.

A lot of possibilities with this!
Thanks and a tip o' the hat to John!