Our little girl is growing ridiculously fast. This project was over due. I made a height board for our son when he was about a year old, our daughter is just shy of 18 months. Our sons board was made with spray paint and stencils.



With the 3D printers and laser cutter at our disposal now I wanted to try a different route this time



Using abs I 3d printed the letters for our daughters name. The letters are 3mm thick and about 90mm tall. the printed very nicely with no warping at all.



Using the laser cutter I created a basic alignment tool from acrylic, the letters were glued on in a jiffy and the board is ready to be installed!



On the next iteration, a gift for a friends daughter, we are going to try laser cutting the letters from colored acrylic.

I had te chance to play with some more slate last night.

I tried a couple things and all came out pretty decent. I used my friends name, BAZ as a guinea pig.

The laser can easily engrave the letters in a traditional raster engraved sense.

With a little twist in Corel I also created the rubber stamp look, etching material away, leaving the letters behind.

Last fun twist was using the vector cut mode to get a deeply engraved outline for the letters. I really like the rubber stamp look the best. The vector cut lines are clean and crisp, but almost too precise to be plainly visible from a distance.

I gave up on the Inkscape to Adobe to laser stuff for vector cutting pretty quick. I downloaded a trial version of Corel draw tonight to improve on a few things from last night. And it worked.

With a little patience I created two sided business cards and the painting stencil for snow plow signs.

Lessons learned...

1: a 450 cfn exhaust fan is enough to suck your business cards right out of the house as soon as they are cut from sheet stock.

2: Corel draw makes vector graphic work much easier

3: Lis is very skilled and gifted with the cad tools.

Once we got the kids to bed it was time to start making things with the laser. Two projects for tonight. 1st is getting some design updates completed for a plastic customer. Second is learning to use this laser effectively.



Lis did an awesome job of taking some pictures of a custom modified (like grinder and sand paper custom) part from samples we did for a customer and recreating the mods in the cad environment. That's for another blog post.

I played with the laser tonight.

First thing I did was make sure I can modulate the power with the laser drivers as I expected. I tested this on a piece of slate. I was also curious if 100% power from the laser could do anything super cool like make the slate explode. That test was inconclusive. 

I created this drawing where each color tells the laser what power to use when etching via color. For the human readers I also spelled out that color in English. I then used the laser in raster mode to etch those English words into my piece of slate.

Results were good! Check out how deep the etching is on the 100! (Never mind that red color... We were playing with a pen for slate coloring) 

Next step was laser cut business cards from some card stock we have. This test also checked the ability of the laser to be gentle on something like paper. I created a simple graphic design and vector cut file and voila!

Obviously laser cut business cards aren't incredibly cost effective but it's part of the learning process.

Another fun fact learned tonight is I might have used a little too much power for the vector cutting. This was really obvious when I took out the cardboard backer I was doing the business cards on.

Stone, cardboard and paper... Check! 
Stay tuned for the next laser projects... Wood and then acrylic.

It's been a long night but the laser is installed and running. We just did some power tests and it's cutting our first stencil for some snow removal signs in cardboard.

The big Universal laser arrived today and we got it moved in. Can't wait to finish setting it up so we can put it to work!

We printed a couple versions of the part as we are trying to perfect our raft-less printing techniques on our newest 3D printer. Our experiments with Kapton tape on perf-board are working pretty well, but we still had a little bit of warp-age on the bottom. For the deliverable print we went to our older machine that is tried and trued for ABS with a glass printing bed. The Plus 2 has an open build platform, it looks like we will have to make an enclosure to help regulate temperature while printing.  

This is our first test of the blog!  Lets talk a little about plastic bearings. 
I recently attended some online training after reading this: 
Industry News: Plastic bearings are a real thing now...  Design News article on plastic composite bearings
After seeing the hard, self lubricating plastic at work in the demos and training material we went looking for samples of the material. 
We have samples of the IGUS iGlide 3D printable material in stock before you can buy them. 
The applications i have seen for this material include more of what i would call a 'bushing'... stay tuned for test prints!