For this homework assignment my partner, Roy, and I were given an image of the Rice war owl and asked to make a high contrast laser etch/cut of it. We had a significant amount of trouble with this assignment. First we edited the illustrator file and that went well. Then we were trained to use the machine by lab techs at the OEDK and they were all super helpful and nice! But the real problems began when we did our first owl cut. It started out by cutting every etch line, so we stopped the machine early and adjusted the settings on engrave pro. You can see the leftover individual pieces and the board here:

With our new adjusted file, we ran it through the laser cutter again, and this time it turned out way better:

The main problem with this one was that it was a bit burned on the “Rice” part and the left half is way darker than the right because the board was warped. So for our next run we made the power/speed adjustments and we tried to tape down the wood securely and we got this owl:

Which is really nice, but it’s still darker on the left side, so we decided to come back in later and use different non-warped wood. When we got new wood, we started having some new troubles. For some reason the owl would go all the way through the engraving process and then try to cut out the edge, but it wouldn’t make it all the way through, rather it would make it through part of the way and you’d basically have to hammer the owl out of the board, which ended with really ugly, splintered edges. We had even run a test cut before running the owl, to make sure the cut setting was high enough, but with the bigger owl image, apparently the settings weren’t sufficient. Eventually by really kicking up the power, we got the laser to cut through the board. Also in the interest of time, we started trying to reduce the surface area we engraved, and also just messing around with which sections to engrave, and which to leave un engraved. We finally decided to leave “Rice” un engraved, which also helped with contrast. The first one we ran in this style, unfortunately left the “ow” from owls un engraved and left the claws very faint, since we didn’t think to change that in Illustrator:

After fixing the file, and figuring out the cut settings, we (finally) got our beautiful, high contrast owl that was cut out perfectly:

All in all, learning to use the laser cutter was really fun and interesting (and only a little bit frustrating). I think that all the problems and the failures we ran into really gave us more experience using the laser cutter and figuring out its settings and features.