Laser cutting keyed joints

To be honest the laser cutting module turned out to be much less daunting than I’d thought it’d be. My past experiences with laser cutting have been a bunch of nerves, terrified that I’ll press a wrong button and cause havoc in the room but this time round the process was relatively smooth gliding and easy to troubleshoot.

The first problem I faced was that the printer miss an outline on one of my parts: Thinking that it was probably my problem – I went back and recut the pieces, only selecting the particular path that was missing and put in the stroke rating at 0.001 in while turning the others to ‘0’. I figured that I liked the pieces the way they looked and didn’t want to get them burnt the second run. Unfortunately the same problem happened the second run and the machine still cut the other parts again; I ended up with slightly burnt parts.

I then decided to fix the path myself instead of just changing the stroke. It was completed by simply copy and pasting the bottom piece’s outline and replacing the top piece’s.

I also got two different kinds of wood pieces with similar thickness, but slightly different colors, just to see how it would turned out. I varied the speed and started from 4 going up to 6, testing out how it looked like and finally picked the ones that I was happy with.

You can see the beautiful brown here.

Final product. I actually like both wood colors and how they differ slightly in terms of how the etching looked like on each piece. One down side of this joint is that the measurements themselves aren’t very apt, hence the joints aren’t the easiest things to turn. However in conclusion, this lab turned out to be a pretty enjoyable lab and I’ll definitely be laser cutting more in the future! 🙂

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