The assignment for this week was to laser cut the Rice war owl. The elaborate nature of the file we had to print made it a fun challenge to practice using different settings in the laser cutter.

1. File preparation:
   1. I started with the .ai file available to us on Canvas.
   2. I decided immediately to shrink the size of the owl to make it more manageable to cut. I ended up choosing to make it ~3 in wide and ~2.5 inches tall. Before starting to mess with laser settings, I wanted to visualize what I wanted thee Owl to look like on Illustrator. This hopefully saved me time later on. My image is to the right. I decided to change the 4-color owl into a 3-color owl (combining the two darkest colors) because I found it more aesthetically pleasing this way.
   3. To make sure the file would cut properly, I identified the background layer that contained the outline for the whole owl and set the stroke to a visible color. This is also seen in the picture above
2. Playing with Laser Cutter Settings
   1. When I got to the laser cutter, my goals were (1) to learn how to use the color mapping settings to do a variety of different raster types all at once, and (2) develop some intuition for what speed and power settings to use to get to my desired owl.
   2. To achieve the second goal, and knowing that cutting a bunch of test owls would take an incredibly long time, I started out by cutting small squares at different speed and power settings. I was looking for two settings that would have good contrast but not burn the wood. I ended up cutting about 15 squares of different intensities.Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of the results, but I settled for the following:
      1. Dark: S30, P50
      2. Light: S75, P25
   3. For the vector cuts, I used S5, P100. These are the settings that we had used in class that had worked for cutting the same material.
3. Cutting the Owl:
   1.  Cutting the owl went surprisingly well following the initial calibration phase. I cut two different owls of different sizes and both turned out well!
   2. The first owl was a smaller one (3″ x 2.5″, approximately).The picture is below: It looks a little smudged in the picture, but I am fairly sure that is the result of my handling of the piece with dirty fingers.
   3.  I decided that such a small owl wasn’t going to impress anyone and I had some extra time at the cutter so I decided to cut a slightly larger one and see any effects of scaling. The second owl is bigger (4.5″ x 3″, approximately). The picture of this one is below.For some reason, the bigger owl’s light color raster came out with visible lines. I’m curious as to why it happened, but actually like the texture that came out so am not bothered by it very much.

In all, this was a fun exercise to become more comfortable with the laser cutter and now I get some fun toys to show my friends who claim that as an Applied Math major, I am not an engineer 🙂