4. Computer controlled cutting¶

I worked on creating a press-fit kit, laser cutting & vinyl cutting.

Group Assignment¶

You can find our group assignment in this link.

Vinyl Stickers¶

I have used some of the designs I made previously to make vinyl stickers. Design steps can be found in this link. I had to save the files in DXF format. Then, opened it in the Vinyl cutter printing software and changed the material to vinyl glossy. Finally, clickedon send button to send the job request to the cutter.

Vinyl 1 Vinyl 2

Rhino 22

Because the stickers were big & that I wanted to modify the alignments a bit, I removed them like normal stickers & sticked it on my laptop.

Vinyl 2

Rhino 16 Vinyl 3

But for stickers with several parts, I would need to use transfer sheet to maintain their original alignments. These are the steps required:

Cut the transfer tape the same size as the vinyl sticker.
Place your tape on the vinyl sheet to ensure that all parts will be sticked excatly at the same place.
Slowly remove the unwanted parts (weeding).
Stick your design on the surface you want.

Press- Fit¶

Rhino¶

We continued last week work shop, where we used a press fit made in Rhino and added our designs on it. I deleted some parts from the design I made last week.

press-fit 1 press-fit 2

I have sanded a clear acrylic to give it a snowy look.

sanding

Solid Works¶

My kit consists of 2 shapes made using Solid Works. Design steps can be found in this link

Solid works 1 Solid works 5

First, we have connectted the exhaust pipe to the laser cutter. During the engraving and cutting operation of a laser, smoke and particulates are generated as the engraving material is being vaporized by the laser. A laser system is designed to facilitate the efficient removal of the smoke and particulates by drawing them out of the enclosure using an exhaust system.

laser exhaust

I have changed the grove size to 1.15 mm to make it suitable for cardboard thikness. I have saved the files in DXF format, to enable me to open it in Inkscape to prepare it for printing. After opening the file in Inkscape, I have putted both shapes in one file. At first, I only tried cutting one sample of each shape. When that was successful, I made another file with more shapes. I made some changes to the file. First, I have changed the stroke color to red. The laser printing settings depends on colour coding in which we made the colour red to mean a cut through.

laser cutting 1

Then, changed the stroke width to 0.001 in.

laser cutting 2

In Document properties, custom size section, we need to ensure that the width and height of the document is the same size of the piece that we will be cutting.

After that, I saved the file as PDF file and opened the file. Then, I clicked on printing and then properties. In Epilog Engraver I set the piece size. After that, I checked the material settings in Epilog job manager and added it setting in colour mapping. Added the following settings to colour red:

Speed: 30%
Power: 40%
Freq.: 500

laser cutting 4 laser cutting 3