For this week’s progress meeting, I was able to get magnets, more 1/8″ wood and card stock to make some layers for my final light box. (As a reminder, I’m basing these new slides of one of my favorite games, INSIDE.)

In this iteration, I swapped out the thicker 1/4″ wood with 1/8″ wood, and swapped the 1/8″ wood I used for capturing moving parts with card stock. This made each layer 2x or 4x thinner than before (depending on whether it was static or moveable), which I was very happy about. The main drawback is that the card stock isn’t super strong – it holds in moving parts just fine, but it doesn’t do well if you pry layers apart too much.

Below you can see the construction of the sliding layers – two wood pieces capture the slider, and the laser-cut paper pieces hold those in place.

The magnets are much stronger than I’d anticipated, making it hard to separate the layers from each other without popping out magnets or bending paper/wood. They are only press-fit (shown below), so I have to be careful about not pulling them too hard without shaving material off the wood or the magnet itself. I will have to live with that for the most part, but I will also try to shed some of their power by dropping them repeatedly (as some people suggested in the meeting).

For the showcase on Monday, I hope to have a few more static and movable layers constructed. Not much more to go – I’m excited to see how it comes out!