2D CAD and laser cutting
Making a sticker a wooden stand.
Used tools and technologies:
- CO2 Laser - Epilog Fusion PRO 80W
- Sanding belt machine and hand grinder
- Cutting plotter
Design
For laser-cutting project, I went straight for wood as my material. I wanted to created a useful everyday object and cardboard just does not have enough durability and stiffness. With previous experience with CAD and image vectorization, I thought its going to be quick. Spoiler: it was not!
The goal was to make a simple and dismountable stand for ukulele/viola, both my favorite musical instruments. I did some basic sketches on a whiteboard, then moved to fusion and spend some time experimenting with the shape and style. While shaping the upper part which holds the instrument neck, I noticed similarity with my previous make, the sticker. And so I just tweaked the shape just a little bit and added eye holes to make it into a Brachiosaurus head. My favorite dinosaur by the way.
Manufacturing
Machine I used, Epilog Fusion PRO has a CO2 laser of 0.3 mm width. It provides 610 x 610 x 228 mm workspace, 60 or 100 watts of power for the CO2 laser and overlooking iris camera build in. I had long trouble calibrating the laser power and speed to achieve full cut with no fire inferno, caused by the laser burning the wood. It turned out that the compressor for sucking the air out was off the whole time and when switched on, fire was negligible. I had some self-drawn test cubes cutted for understanding the process and tolerance approximation. Despite my effort, my first atempt failed as the laser did not cut through the wood because of a misclick in settings. So -176kč (-7€) for the wasted material. Second time I got it right. Still, since I used 6mm hard wood, the inside of the cut was charcoaled. Light sanding on a sand-belt machine and a hand sander solved this. For aesthetics, I added an engraved symbol of a brontosaurus afterwards to the bottom. See on the right:
Peek inside the laser in work.
Used sand belt machine. Cleaning the edges took around 20 min.
Hand grinder used for cleaning and smoothing the surface.
CAD model with ukulele reference.
The stand design prevents instrument from tilting sideways.
Calibration test cubes
Sticker making
Second task was to create a costume sticker. A cutting plotter works by precisely moving a sharp blade across a material (vinyl, paper, sticker paper) based on given instructions from a digital input. To use it, we insert desired size of chosen material layed flat on a PVC backing. The blade applies just enough pressure to cut throught the material without cutting the backing. Blade in used plotter is a tangential blade - a blade that actively rotates to maintain proper orientation to the direction of the cut. Moving the blade is done in an X plane while material is moved in the Y plane.
The whole cutting proces takes within a minute for a small sticker like mine. First I used a generic image of a brontosaurus, smoothed the backround in GIMP and then generated a vector files, format .svg, in Inkscape. Then, I scaled this vector image in plotter software (img_1) and send a command to the plotter. It turned out pretty well.
Plotter
The ruster on top is a sticky foil to help with applying the sticker on a surface.
Summary
This project took longer, then I anticipated, but the laser-cutting experience will be very useful in the future. As always, feel free to let me know and feedback or improvements.