Intro to Fabrication
Feb 15, 2022Week 3
Make something with the laser cutter.
I also loved the hingey things but am saving working with them for another project.
I decided to work with acrylic because I had some left over from a past project.
I always forget this number, so here for reference:
Cut = 0.001 stroke
Anything else is an etch.
First I spray painted mirrored, frosted, and amber transparent acrylic in the spray booth:
Then created this shape + modified lighting in https://spline.design.
Adjusted lighting further in photoshop.
Used an ascii art generator to turn the image into letters. Tweaked it to 150 lines from the website’s 300 lines.
Why ascii art? I wanted to reduce the engraving time, and thought it would be interesting to have this detail in the engraving, especially as it would create texture for the image that I thought would play well with the kinds of acrylic I had.
Resulting in this:
Laser cutting:
Raster settings for engraving:
The engraving took 3 minutes and a half.
The image turned out nicely on the mirrored acrylic, but the laser cut had burned the paint.
