Week 03
This is my third week at FabAcademy. The assignment of this week consists of the following:
group assignment: do your lab’s safety training characterize your lasercutter’s focus, power, speed, rate, kerf, joint clearance and types individual assignment: cut something on the vinylcutter design, lasercut, and document a parametric construction kit, accounting for the lasercutter kerf, which can be assembled in multiple ways, and for extra credit include elements that aren’t flat
Group Assignment
This week was my first time using a laser cutting machine, as well as a vinyl cutter. The group work was performed along with my colleagues Francisco Ruz and José Antonio Vazquez. During the group work, we made the step-by-step for setting up both cutters including safety training, characterization and hands-on for making several sample cuts to test the possibilities of the machines. Plase refer to this website for a detailed documentation of the steps we followed during the group work: https://fabacademy.org/2025/labs/aindustriosa/week03.html
Individual Assignment, part 1 cutt something in the vinyl cutter
Regarding the vinylcutter, we acquired a Shillouette vynil machine in our lab and installed the Shillouette software. After setting up the machine our instructor guided us in the basics for using both the software and machine. This was exemplified cutting stickers and vinyls. Afterwards, we worked in a design and tested a cut in the machine.
In my case I wanted to reproduce a vinyl stick of the WWF logo. To have this done, I downloaded the logo and then inside the free version of the Shillouette software I resized it and defined the cutting and contour lines.
Then I set up the vinyl in the machine and cut the logo as shown below.
Individual Assignment, part 2 design, lasercut, and document a parametric construction kit
Before designing my construction kit, I was developing a thickness gauge for understaning the kerf thickness effect of the laser beam thickness in the cutting. In my case I worked with cardboard of 4 mm in thickness, so I elaborated the gauge exactly using the same cardboard that latter will serve for the construction kit. The design of the gauge was parametrically developed in grasshopper with simple operations; basically, one needs to set a rectangular contour and substract small rectangular cells represenging assembly joints with different thicknesses.
In my case I defined as 4 mm - i.e. the thickness of the raw cardboard material -, as average value for the size of the joints and then created a series of joints increasing or decreasing by 0,05 mm that value. This resulted in a cardboard comb containing joints that ranged from 3,85 mm up to 4,15 mm.
Then by trying to joining a couple of combs with each size of assemblies, it was concluded that the best fit was obtained with 3,85 mm, which means that 0,15 mm of material is lost in each joint, i.e. about 0,037 mm per cutting.
Once the kerf thickness was understood I started with the design of my construction kit, which was to be likewise developed with the 4 mm thick cardboard. For doing that, I worked in Grasshopper to achieve a parametric design of the kit. My stragegy was developing a kit made of polygons made of different number of sides, ranging from 3 up to 10 sides. Then, I parametrically inserted a joint of the previous 3,85-mm-thick callibrated thickess ad the middle of each side. Here for instance you can see the operations nedded for achieving a parametric triangle with the desired joints.
Then I programmed all the rest of polygons.
Which resulted in the following design.
Once the design was ready, I exported the joined polylines that constitute the perimeter of each polygon to Coreldraw and used it to send the data to the laser cutting machine, which was set up with the same parameters used for cutting the gauge comb.
This resulted in my construction kit,
Demonstrating a perfect fit in the joints!
Here you can download the Grasshopper file of my parametric construction kit as well as my SVG for cutting:
