First thing I felt ready to hang on the wall in the house....

I wanted to make something for a spot in the kitchen, so I chose the first intials of each of us in the family (probably will re-do later with other letters, but it's a good start). It's hard to see the detail in the picture, but I wanted to connect the letter witout being able to see the connector joint. The soulution was that each letter piece is two pieces - one 1/8" ply of Baltic Birch Plywood, and a 1/16" pience of basswood vaneer on top. The ply has the T-shaped notches for the connectors (see in blue of the incscape design), the vaneer doesn't. The result is really great.

 

However, some lessons were learned. Next time, I think I will finish the wood FIRST before cutting. The staining, sanding and finishing was really tough after it was cut. Also, a lesson learned before this was to not use Birch Plywood, but to use Baltic Birch Plywood. As seen in the image below, regular Birch can burn horribly when you try to cut it. This is because of layers of dark glule between the wood. The Baltic Birch Plywood uses a white glue, there are no dark layers when viewing from the side. The 1/8" cuts great at 30% speed and 100% power. I cut the vaneer at 80% and 100% power.

  

Reactor!

A while back I downloaded software from Jason Dorie's CNC website called Reactor (http://jasondorie.com/page_cnc.html), which creates a "reaction/diffusion" pattern seeded from an image. It's a really neat effect, but needs to be done with just the right image. So far, the only face shots I've successfully seen work are with sunglasses on. Here's on of my wife and I on the beach in Northern California. It's on black acrylic. I'd like to do it again on wood.  

Crosshair Aiming Lasers

My Full Spectrum 40W hobby laser came with a beam combiner for the red dot aiming, but then I read that the combiner lens can reduce the power of the laser up to 20%. I don't know how accurate that it is, but it makes sense that some of the power would be lost with it, so I went with option #2 instead. Based on Glenn's design here (http://glennlangton.blogspot.com/2011/08/laser-cutter-cross-hair-guide-for-under.html). However, I made a couple modifications. First, I modified the SVG to hold 2 of the Deal Extreme lasers, instead of reusing the original laser. That was a quick copy and paste of the arm section. Second, I added a line not all the way across the connected side of the arm so that I could easy bend the arms with heat.

The red line lasers were horribly out of focus. So, I laser cut a small circle with a slit (0.312" diameter) of the top of a post-it, and stuck this over the Fresnel lens on the inside of the laser. The result was a much more crisp line. To aim the lasers, I used the machine to vector two lines onto a piece of wood, then aligned the lasers to these lines. A couple drops of super glue went onto the lasers after they were aimed to help hold them tight.

The photos below, the red lines appear fuzzier than they really are, the phone's camera was too sensitive to the red light. I have a little cleanup to do still on the wiring.

A little practice with Escher

Here's a couple pieces I did this afternoon to play a little with 1/8" birch ply. I'd eventually like to do a bigger lizard tessalation. These are just test pieces. I find it hard to cut without significantly smoking the edges. These were cut at 60% speed, 100% power, 2 passes. The thin lines were 100% speed, 20% power. The Sky and Water engraving was at 100% speed and 50% power, 500x500.  Probably to much, I lost a little detail, maybe 30% next time. 

Circuit Stand

A few months before purchasing the laser cutter, I designed this small circuit to simulate electrical signals for the equipment I work with. While the circuit wasn't designed really for mounting, I came up with this little stand to make it a little nicer looking. It's smoke grey 3/16" Acrylic, rastering was at 100% speed 100% power, vector cuts were 10% speed 60% power. 

Free Patterns

I came across this site with lots of free vector patterns. I think these will be useful later on. 

http://www.craftsmanspace.com/free-patterns

Butterfly Test Cut....

Found an easy butterfly graphic for my next text cut, it was easy to modify to get into the right format, and the cutting went well. 1/8" ply. The first one I did was at 30% speed and 40% power, it didn't quite make it through all the way on all the lines, so I did another at 30% speed and 50% power, it came out very clean. The kerf is very tight, should be good for any application I have in mind.

As you can see from the pictures, smoke is very minimal, the exhaust system does a wonderful job.