Kelly here, and I think the laser cutter is pretty darn cool. Helen has worked with it before, so she helped me figure out a lot of it. After learning how to use Adobe Illustrator, I went and made a small cow key chain design for Valentine’s Day. Helen fashioned herself an OEDK logo, Valentine’s Day edition. We used the laser cutter to make these, along with the clock parts Dr. Wettergreen wanted.

To get acquainted with the laser cutter, I decided to make a cow key chain. I found a drawing of a cute cow online, imported it into Illustrator, and traced it by hand using the pen tool. I had to make some decisions as to which parts of the cow to “shade” in. I ended up just filling in his spots and his eyes. After tweaking the lines and anchors a bit, I got him to the shape I wanted. With some of Helen’s guidance, I managed to get two copies of the cow cut. They came out alright (in my opinion), though literally everyone who has seen them commented that, “the tail looks like it’s going to snap off.” They haven’t. So ha.

(Still haven’t figured out how to rotate these images)

Helen cut out her OEDK logo with some difficulties concerning the different overlapping shapes in the design. With some tweaking on Illustrator and help from Dr. Wettergreen, it came out as nature intended. We also found out what happens if you set the speed setting on the laser cutter too high. Don’t try it. It’s pretty disturbing.

As for the clock parts, we had a pretty easy time cleaning up the PDF files. After deleting some text and lines, both files were ready to go. I went ahead and deleted some redundant copies of the arch-looking pieces. We just needed to do it three more times. Initially, we had a hard time figuring out what the power and speed setting should be, or how many passes we needed to pierce the wood completely. Sometimes, it would go through in some places of the wood and not others, resulting in us chipping or breaking the piece as we tried to punch it out of the wood. I believe we settled on about 3 passes. This resulted in a bit of charring on our pieces, but overall, nothing that couldn’t be cleaned up with a spare rag.

When we were preparing to cut the larger file, Helen had to get a little creative in the arrangement so that it would fit on the piece of wood we had. It worked out in the end, and there didn’t seem to be any major consequences from the rearrangement. As far as the final product goes, we weren’t sure about which pieces were actually needed. So, we decided to keep all of them to be sure. Overall, we would call this a success.