Last week we learned how to use the laser cutter. We cut a Rice owl logo from plywood.

First we took the provided illustrator and uploaded into Engrave.

Then we changed the colors of the outlines depending on the depth we wanted the wood cut at that point. We had a few problems where certain shapes could not be internally selected, so we ended up deleting some of the white shapes around the RICE area.

 

After we finished grouping areas by depth (as seen by color differences in the diagram) we decided on power and speed to cut our owl. We decided that the deepest parts, which correspond to the darker parts for the illustrator file, should be the highest power, about 70. We then incremented the other areas lower, deciding that the white areas should be left completely uncut.

Once we finished cutting our owl out (it took about half an hour) we noticed that there was a lot of soot residue from the cutting which darkened some parts that should be white. The amount of time was also too long for a project like this. We noted that cutting with lower power settings would probably solve both problems.