Laser cutting room is definitely one of my favorite space in OEDK! It is a beautiful room that smells anciently like campfire, but equipped with two high-tech laser cutting machines. To Casey and me, this room is an altar of creativity. In the past two weeks, Casey and I challenged ourselves with the mission to make a perfect “battle owl” laser cut. Though, as professor Wettergreen predicted, we encountered many frustrating difficulties, in the end we successfully relived the battle owls on both Balsa wood and acrylics.

 

Part 1, interesting&frustrating challenges we have met.

 

Challenge 1 “Double Owls”

When we imported the owl logo into the Engravelab, we found that there were two owls on the drawing pad. The lines of the two owls were intersecting each other and it was impossible to simply delete one of the owls. We tried to reimport the file, but it also didn’t work. After working 10 minutes in futile, Casey and I guessed that the problem may be within the ai file. And there it is! We figured out that the file was made up of two layers of owls, a large owl on the upper layer and a small owl on the lower layer.(See picture below). We deleted the small owl and solve the picture.

Challenge 2 “Beheaded Owl”

Our first trial was a terrible one. We wanted to cut the outer boundary of the battle owl logo and we set the program to cut the blue lines. After the cutting, however, we found that the owl was “beheaded”—different parts of the logo no longer linked to each other and the piece of wood was scattered. We went back to our setting to find the problem and we realized that the blue lines not only contains the boundary of the owl, but also the lines of other parts.

 

To solve the problem, we ungrouped the picture in the illustrator and deleted all the points within the boundary and filled the shape with “no color” and made it a boundary line. We imported the boundary line into the engrave lab, set it with a different color and solely cut the boundary line.

 

With that, we saved our owl!

 

Challenge 3 “Missing White”

 

Another interesting problem we encountered was that our owls were lacking some touches. (See the picture below).

 

We realized that the parts set to white were not at all engraved! We first thought we set the power of the white color too low and increased the power by 30%. However, the white part is still not engraved. Later, by observing the sparks of laser cut we figured that the machine ignored the part that is set white(some weird feature of the software). So, simply by changing the color of the lines from white to another color, we solved the problem!

 

 

Part 2, strategy we used to make our owl look cool.

We chose not to engrave the blue part, because the part had the largest area. It would take a long time to engrave it and the part may be easily burnt as the laser cutter would focus on the area for a relatively long time. For the rest three colors, we set the power based on their darkness extent. Grey gets the most power, yellow in the middle and white gets the least power.

 

Following are our power/speed setting:

 

Wood:

Outline：Speed 40 Power 50

Grey : Speed 400 Power 50

Yellow: Speed 400 Power 26

White: Speed 400 Power 16

 

Acrylic:

Outline：Speed 30 Power 75

Grey : Speed 400 Power 50

Yellow: Speed 400 Power 26

White: Speed 400 Power 16

 

 

See our cool owls cut with the parameters above！

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 3 Fun Time!

 

After finishing the owl we are about to turn in as homework. We chose to make some swags for ourselves. Casey and I made some cute key-chains.

These key-chains are actually all experimental because we used different power-speed set to figure out a best solution to engrave on a small area.（Notice that since the area is small, it’s really easy to overheat a part and make it really dark and thus lose all the details.

 

 

 

During the process, we also tested drawing the whole logo with solely laser cutting, which also gave us really beautiful picture!