Wow this took Tibbie and me a long time to complete. We ran into quite a bit of unexpected difficulties along the way.

For our first owl we didn’t quite configure our ai file right, leaving some extra lines that ended up being cut instead of engraved. Having learned our mistake, we went back to illustrator and with help from Mikaela we managed to fix it.

This time, our owl unfortunately turned out a bit toastier than we had imagined. We must have set the power on too high. We weren’t sure what settings we should use. So ultimately, we decided to just lower them by an arbitrary value that we deemed sufficient and see where that takes us.

I thought that was going to be the last of our problems. Oh how wrong I was to think that.

The owl’s engraves look nicer now, but it was here that we ran into the first of our many difficulties caused by warped wood. Because of the wood’s imperfect geometry, one side was propped higher than the other, so the engraves were uneven. It’s not very clear in this picture, but the left half ended up a bit darker than the right.

 

We tried using tape to hold down and flatten the wood, but it wasn’t strong enough. We ended up finding some better quality boards and tried again. Foolishly using the same settings.

Oops. Our cut was set to a power of 30, which had no problem cutting through the old board. But our new board was tougher and the owl didn’t cut out. Always do a test cut!

Also we decided to not engrave the letters on the owl to obtain a better contrast with the rest of the wood. After deleting an engraving, we upped the power to 40 and test cut a square. Looks good!

Wtf.

A little bit stumped after this, I went to talk to Nathan, one of the lab techs and a fellow MechE from Lovett. It went something like this:

Me: “Hey Nathan, so we upped the power to 40 and test cut a square, which came out, but when we cut the actual owl it didn’t cut through again.”

Nathan: “Huh that’s weird. You should just up the power to 60 or something.”

Me: “60? Are you sure that will cut through?”

Nathan: “Oh yeah definitely, 60 power should be way more than enough.”

So we went at it with 60 power.

Don’t believe Nathan’s lies.

(We actually tried to savage this one by cutting it out manually, but a part of its left ear splintered off. I took it back to my dorm and it’s currently chilling on my window.)

At this point I’m not really sure what happened next. All I remember was that I was frustrated and that we tried some other stuff, I think upping the power to 80, and that still didn’t work.

Eventually, we gave up on this board and went to look for another one. On hindsight we should have just found another board from the get go. But this board was probably the least warpped wood we found so we really wanted to cut from it. We also kept thinking “just a little more power and it would cut out” and before we knew it we had like four failed owls on our hands.

Our final owl using a different board! We also took out the engraving from a lot of the owl’s body, preferring a slick and bright look. The one good thing that came out of this “adventure” is that after cutting our owl that many times,  I became really familiar with EngraveLab and many of its functions. Hopefully this experience will prove useful for the midterm!

Bonus: picture of me configuring the cut settings