To begin thinking about this assignment I drew upon my own previous laser cutting experience. I remembered a fair amount from when I laser cut a drone frame out of plywood and acrylic in high school. To begin the cutting process I knew that any work on a laser cutter would take time and the amount time would increase for this project because we were engraving the material. Because of this, I convinced Joey that we should not experiment with the engraving settings on the final design. That would take too long and would not produce results that could be easily compared. For this reason, I suggested that we work in small boxes (1″ – 1/2″) on 1/4 inch plywood. This allowed us to quickly decide which power and speed settings we preferred and compare them. Below is the series of tests that we did. We ended up picking three of these different settings.

In order to speed up the process of cutting the final war owl we decided to use the functionality of the laser cutter to our advantage. We assigned different colors to different power and speed settings in order to cut the entire owl at the same time. However, knowing that the final owl had to have four distinct colors, we only engraved with three different settings and left the natural color of the wood as the fourth. For our owl trials, we decided to make the largest area in the drawing the plain wood. This sped up our tests by a lot. Below are our final power and speed settings (the first three: red, green, and blue).

When cutting our first owl, we had the engraving done perfectly and we were super excited about that but, when we tried to cut out the shape of the owl the laser ended up cutting out all of the little pieces within the owl. We realized that each shape inside the owl had a line thickness and thus the laser was recognizing them as lines to be cut. This ruined our first try but we learned that we had to exit the illustrator file. We released the clipping mask on the owl and removed the line thickness of the inside shapes so that the laser would only cut out the outer dimension.

At first we thought that we only had to cut one owl for our group and this was it:

We were very satisfied with how it came out but, when we realized that we needed two, we knew that we could do better. We recut two more owls. Below is a comparison photo between our first successful try (bottom) and the final owl (top):

We achieved a much nicer coloring to the owl and had fewer burn marks. The final problem that we had with our owl is that the second one we cut did not cut all of the way through the plywood, likely because the plywood was warped and thus the focus of the laser was off. We had already moved the plywood too much to recut the lines so we tried (and failed) to remove the shape.

We had a lot of tear out along the edges of the owl so we cut another one. After we had cut the final owl, we got a piece of 220 grit sandpaper from the machine shop and lightly sanded just the surface of the piece to remove the burn marks but keep all of the engraving intact. The top owl is post sanding and bottom is pre sanding.

These are our two final owls:

I learned more about the laser cutter from this exercise. After cutting out third owl we were able to chain together the raster and vector settings in order to cut out a final owl in 17 minutes and 54 seconds. This exercise taught me more about machine paths and how drawing the shape is only the beginning. It takes many trials to perfect an idea.