For this project, I chose to do the beginner assignment. This is because I have never laser cut before, and I wanted to make sure I gave myself room to explore mistakes and unexpected failures without making the assignment way too difficult for myself. I expected this to go by a lot faster, but I ran into a lot of issues I still don’t quite understand. I definitely learned a lot from this experience.
The first thing I did was measure the thickness of the wood. I used digital calipers to do this. Below is a picture of me measuring the thickness, as well as the measurement I obtained:
Inconsistent measurements across calipers, but I had to choose something
I actually did this with another caliper before, and it was almost exactly 5 mm. The measurement fluctuated a bit for some reason, but I ultimately chose this measurement to avoid getting stuck on which value to choose.
With the measurement out of the way, it was now time to measure the kerf for my specific settings. After finally getting my name plate to cut (more on that later), I found that after four cycles, most of the outline had been cut, but some of it stayed together. I tried pushing the name plate out of its slot, and I was successful. However, I damaged some of the rest of the wood slightly. In response to this, I lowered the speed setting down to 30% from 37%-38%. This was able to cut through completely. I had now determined the settings I was going to use to cut, derived from the suggested settings provided by the teaching team:
Resolution: 600 DPI
You would think I was ready to cut the kerf by now, but issues occurred. As mentioned before, I still hadn’t figured out how to cut through the wood (the order of events described here might be messed up; I was bouncing back and forth between the name plate and box since the TA also couldn’t figure out how to cut through). I used the recommended setting of 0.072 pt for cutting, but I kept getting a run time of zero seconds. After a lot of troubleshooting, I tried 0.0072 pt and it worked. I know the pt won’t affect the kerf because it is only a flag for the program to determine if it’s a cut or an engraving; only the settings I input in the print dialog box will affect the kerf width. I proceeded to cut out the kerf, shown below, along with a test square to make sure I can cut:
It finally cut
Importing the kerf file into illustrator:
Here is a video of the laser cutting process for the kerf:
Why don’t I have basically any kerf?
There was basically no kerf for some reason; this was strange. I couldn’t even measure it using calipers, so I used a ruler instead to get some kerf value, however small:
Even the total kerf is tiny
I now had all the information I needed to create the net of my box in MakerCase. I used the standard measurements of a cubic box of side length 4″ (4″x4″x4″), a wood thickness of 4.85 mm=0.191 in, and a kerf offset of 0.05 mm=0.002 in.
I changed the box net into 6 shapes in Illustrator and added my name, class, semester, and date on one side of the box and the college crest on the other. The box net had some issues, however. I saw a nonzero print time, which was good, but it only engraved once again. I am not sure what the issue was or if I verified the pt was set to 0.0072 like last time, but I ended up just removing the engraving parts and just doing a cut, and that worked. Here is a video of the successful engraving:
To cut out the box, I forgot to change my speed setting to 30%, so I just added one additional cycle and that worked. Here is the finished box:
Cost Analysis:
Raw materials: 5 mm thick board of wood: $25.99 for 16 boards: $1.62 per board. $1.62
Labor:
I chose $10 per hour because the knowledge I gained about the laser cutter software and Adobe Illustrator for laser cutting was substantial, and the final product looks presentable.
Machine/Software time:
The total cost is $134.61
As you can see, most of the cost comes from access to software and machines, assuming the labor is not considered.
Here is a photo of my clean workspace:
