The openness of the brief through me on this exercise, I did not want to repeat the vinyl exercise and all the kit parts that I could think of made one item - not my most creative time. In order to see a laser cutter in action - I have viewed them before but never actually cut anything - I finally opted for a design that does not click together.

My design will allow me to assess how much different the machine cut is from hand work so I chose a toy that I have been considering making for some time but which has a lot of hand work associated, the design is from Making Toys that Teach by Les Neufeld.  At the same time I am working on a larger design which will require fitted parts and changeable parts - a modular gentleman’s jewellery box. I will report back on this later.

Having drawn the parts for the toy using my usual Drawplus from serif I then saved these as a dxf file and imported to the laser cutter software, which made a really fast easy job of cutting these out.

Whilst I was impressed at the speed I was also conscious of the size - this had been drawn on screen and never printed out  and I was shocked at how small the item is. This emphasised the need for some form of physical check on sizes. Okay we all know what 25mm looks like but  do you really know the size of the the object you are making?

Once the shapes were cut I hand sanded each part, stained them and polished each with a traditional woodworkers wax. I could have cut the shapes from acrylic but I would need to have divided up the task over several sheets of different coloured acrylic. The acrylic would certainly have good faces but the corners would need to be redrawn to take the sharpness out and the edges finished in some way after all this is made to be handled by children.