Laser cutting the Rice war owl was an entirely new, challenging but yet rewarding experience for me. I’ve always wanted to learn how to use the later cutter so I found each step of the process very exciting.

First, we had to set up our illustrator file so that the laser cutter could properly cut and engrave our war owl. We already had the war owl vector file so all we had to do was give each part we wanted to raster a fill (indicated by the green, white, red and blue colors on the war owl) and set a stroke on the outline of the owl. Later on in the process, we found out that this step was not as simple as it seems and that there were some complications with our illustrator file (I will talk more about this later in the blog). Once we finished making the file, it was on to the fun part.

The laser cutter was a relatively new machine and was just moved into the OEDK over the summer so a speed/power raster sample wasn’t available for us to use as a reference. We had to make a simplified version of one to test out different raster settings that would give us the details on the owl the best contrast. We set up an illustrator file with 6-9 1/4 inch squares and gave each square a different fill so that each fill corresponds to a different raster setting. We found out how to use color mapping for the laser cutter so we were able to raster all the squares in one job and we chose the speed/power setting for each fill based on what we observed in class. Based on the results, we chose the speed/power settings that we thought would work best for our war owl and began laser cutting 3 inch wide war owls as a sample.

On our first couple of tries, our speed/power settings for the background (indicated by the blue fill on the illustrator file) was too high and it ended up burning the wood and scorching the details surrounding it. As a result, we weren’t able to see the details on the wings of the owl and has to adjust our speed/power settings accordingly. We had a hard time finding the right speed/power settings that would give us the best contrast so Jack came up with a solution. He drew a small square inside a big square on illustrator and gave them different fills so that we could compare the contrast different speed/power settings. Using the results, we were able to choose the settings that we believe would produce the best contrast. These were our 2 final war owls:

The contrast on our first war owl came out nicely but we thought that we could make the contrast even better by reducing the speed/power settings for the background, making it lighter, so that the details would become more visible.

Personally, I’m very pleased with our results! It took us some time to get the right speed/power settings for the raster but our owls look great. I’m looking forward to using the laser cutter again.