Week #3
group assignment:
characterize your lasercutter's focus, power, speed, rate, kerf, and joint clearance.
our group assignment you can find here
individual assignment:
cut something on the vinylcutter
esign, lasercut, and document a parametric construction kit,
accounting for the lasercutter kerf, which can be assembled in multiple ways,
Experience with the vinyl cutter.
The first thing that we have done was reading the manual. Vinyl cutter in our lab is Roland GX-24 and without manual, it was going to be very hard for us to do something(personally I liked that part where it’ says about force adjusting and test cuttings).
After reading the manual I chose the material (vinyl) which I was going to use that was a pretty simple step, then I was choosing what I would cut that took a very long time from me and my friends I have changed three designs. To work with the machine we used Inkscape, unfortunately I forgot to take screenshots from that computer(that was lab’s pc). Anyway, I started my experiments with a vinyl cutter and here are some photos of my first steps.
The first mistake I have done was the wrong scale of the drawing, I imputed pixels instead of millimeters. Then I have done some minor mistakes as well and after that here what I hade.
After I got some experience I start playing wit vinylcutter and make some interesting and funny stickers for my laptop and car. I chose jurassic park logo for car and endmill logo for my laptop. I find some .jpg format logos in internet than transfer them to svg to use in inkscape. Here is the link
Vinyl Sticker Application With Transfer Tape.For transferring vinyl to the surface in our case to the hood of the car,
I need to make the surface wet to make the manipulations with the vinyl easier.
Experience with laser cut.
Work with the laser cutter starts with reading the manual as well, especially the safety rules part.
the second step was to draw and cut tolerance tester which has to be parametric as well. (I choose fusion to do 2d but I don’t think that was a smart decision)
The next step was to drow some parametric press fit-kit, at first I want to make a house from cardboard and actually done the drawing which is parametric as well but because of the short time I decided to cut something simpler.
After finding the right tolerance (which was minus 0.4mm from carboards thickness(4.1-0.4=3.7 )), I changed the parameters and start the cutting process. In our lab to work laser cutter, we use corol drow. I export the files from fusion in .dxf format and import it in corol then assort. the last steps before cutting were to adjust the laser’s focus and its power and speed turning on the compressor and fume extractor.
adjusting the laser speed and power
Final steps almost ready
