Week 4
This week I designed drawing for lasercutting and made test parts to set and check cutting settings and dimensions.
I have made design of press-fit construction kit. As a prototype I’ve used drawing of two parts of kit and edited it to make more parts of other forms with our fablab logo.
In the factory we use a VENO 530 laser machine (https://top3dshop.ru/chpu-stanki/laser-engraver-veno-530.html) It is quite powerful (60W power), works with different materials, and at the same time relatively compact.
We use a conventional CO2 laser, the principle of which is shown in the picture below - the laser beam is focused with the help of a system of mirrors and lenses, and the jet of gas and light cuts through the material, leaving the cuts with a thickness of 0.1 to 0.3 mm, depending on the parameters of focusing and operating mode
I decided to use 4mm plywood for cutting, so during the design process I took into account the thickness of the laser beam in the joints (subtracted 0.2mm from the size of the joints)
After a series of test runs, I chose the following machine mode: 12mm per second, 85% power. In this mode the plywood cut through completely, but on the other hand the beam did not let the tree catch fire. The machine also has a special nozzle with air next to the beam, which removes smoke from the cut, and this stream of air also helped not to ignite the tree. If I turned off the air supply, the tree burst into flames in some cases
Gallery
Here are the results:
This is video of laser cutting process:
The assembled constructor looks like this. Actually, it can be assembled in different ways, all connections are quite strong and can be used repeatedly
Vinyl cutting
As a cutting plotter we use the Mimaki CG-130SRII (https://mimaki.com/product/cutting/c-roll/cg-srII-series/) and FineCut8 plugin for Corel to send jobs to it.
The cutting plotter uses a small, very sharp knife as a tool, and translates the Gcode instructions into X and Y movements of the tool, as well as being responsible for the knife’s outreach and pressing force parameters during the cutting process.
A number of programs are used to create a control code, which turns vector graphics into a set of commands.
In order to prepare the design of the stickers, I used Adobe Illustrator. I decided to make round stickers with the Fabinka logo. I made two choices, one with a contour and the other without it, on the screenshot, the black line is the cutting line. The diameter of both stickers I chose is 40mm.
Video of the vinyl cutting process:
We gave out our stickers to our friends, here are some photos of the stickers used :)
Laser cutting and vinil cutting process are very coool!