- group assigment:
- do your lab’s safety training \(\checkmark\)
- characterize your lasercutter’s focus, power, speed, rate, \(\checkmark\)
- kerf, joint clearance and types \(\checkmark\)
- individual assignment:
- cut something on the vinylcutter. \(\checkmark\)
- design, lasercut, and document a parametric construction kit, accounting for the lasercutter kerf, which can be assembled in multiple ways, \(\checkmark\)
- and for extra credit include elements that aren’t flat \(\checkmark\)
Group assigment
For this assigment Camila did the engraving and cutting characterization and the group page write up for the lab page. I did the kerf characterization. Here teh group assigment can be found:
https://fabacademy.org/2025/labs/cuenca/generic.html
Below, I show my documentation.
Safety training
We read the safety training materials provided by the lab. Some key points to remembers:
- Avoid actions that could compromise the safety or comfort of others.
- Safety goggles may be required in areas where machinery is in use.
- Visitors in fabrication zones must wear closed-toe shoes.
- Upon entering, take note of emergency exits, fire extinguishers, and first aid kits.
- Report any injury, accident, or hazardous situation to a staff member immediately.
- Handle exhibits, tools, and shared resources with care.
For the complete document see:
General Health and Safety Guide
In addition we were shown where the fire extinguishers where.
Laser Cutter specs
In the lab we worked with an Zing-Epilogue laser cutter. This cutter is one of the three laser cutters at the Cuenca Lab and because of its size is the one currently used to in outreach where is loaded up in a van an taken to different towns in the region of Castilla La Mancha.
This laser cutter has the following characteristics:
- 2 inch plano convex lens
- focus length of 38.1 mmm,
- an a CO2 tube
- Cutting area: 406.4 x 304.8 mm
Overall lenses with a shorter focus range will provide a better engraving definition, a lens with a wider focus range will cut thicker materials but will have a bigger dot which may not be the best option for engraving.
This machine is cooled by air and has a filter of activated carbon for filtering the air as it is not expelled outside of the lab. Cooling is important as high temperature will have an impact on the lifetime of the tube.
A stream of air by a compressor is applied to the the lens in order to prevent smoke and debris to reach it.
Is important to remove debree material from the machine frequently and the metal grid it can be cleaned with oven cleaner can be used to clean.
Laser Cutter Safety:
Always be present/observant when the laser is cutting
If the material would catch on fire, stop the machine and use
a fire blanket to smothered the fire and if the blanket does not work a
CO2 foam extinguisher should be used to extinguish the fire.
This machine has automatic shut downs the laser tube if the door is open for safety.
Laser Cuting Testing
In order to characterize cutting as a function of the material we tested different parameters on the fly and thereafter we did some more dedicated tests for the intial parameters we obtained for a corrugated cardboard sheet 4 mm thick:
Speed:50, Power:16, Frequency: 514
similarly for engraving we performed the following test.
Engraving calibration
A cardboard car was designed by Camila where power was varied while speed was held constant at 100%.
We can see that an engraving power higher 20% miggt destroy the cardboard.
Press fitting calibration
Similarly, we wanted to test the thickness we needed to estimate the appropriate cardboard thickness to lock a piece of cardboard into a cardboard slot. For this we cutted a comb of different negative deviations from 4mm and we found that a deviation of 0.4mm (3.6mm) from the original thickness could firmly lock two cardboard pieces together.
The kerf was estimated at 0.1 mm
The comb was designed in Inskape and the boolean tool substraction was used to produce the slits, Mickael show me that it was possible as well to do this by using the command union and the snap tool to measure the dimension of the inner spaces.
Below I show some screenshots of the interface for laser cutting:
Here colors black and blue represent cutting and engraving respectively.
Laser cutter workflow
The following text describes the workflow for the machine after sending our file for printing
- Place the material on the machine.
- If the material is not flat place holders.
- Unlock x/y (Button 8)
- Use the measuring tool to ensure the right focal distance, you might want to do this in more than one place. (Button 5 => 3 or 4)
- Make sure that the printing area on the file coincides with the area to be printed.
- Position manually the lens to set the origin and push button 7
- Check that you have the right file with button 0.
- Send job by pressing the green button.
Other materials tested
We tested two additional materials varying power
Individual Assignment
Laser Cutter
I am fascinated by marine creatures therefore I wanted to personalize my project and do press fitted kit with this theme. What I had in mind was to do a rendering of a school of manta rays. The original idea was:
Implementation
We had to install the sharpertools extension in order to be able to get vector images so we could use the bodies created in Fusion 360.
Below you can find the initial cut of the model. Initially, we had designed the length 4 mm wide finger (in red) this was too small as we could run into some empty spaces in the corrugated cardboard and because of this it could bend. Because of this we increased the length of this finger.
Below you can find the screen shot fot the inskape file and pictures of the assembled model. The connectors fingers have been corrected so they are longer and sturdier.
some assemblying..
and Voilà the final product:
And assembled + vinyl
Previously I run into some trouble trying to modify the base for my design, as I later wanted my hexagons to lock the bases without the need of a connector. However, whenever I modified the parameters the finger lockings structures would disapear. After having already cut my model I was able to modified it, and below I leave some screen shots to show the modified based and to exemplify the use of parameters. I also include some screenshots of the use of circular pattern and extrusion and parameter change.
Vinyl cutter
We also looked at a vinyl cutting machine. The parameters controlled in this machine are pressure in grams and speed in mm/s.
If one wants to have details it advisable to reduce the speed. Another parameter that ones has to define is offset per which is the distance from the center of the blade to its edge. There are different blade angles specifically 30,45 and 60.
Commands:
- Setting: this has to do with baud rates
- Leave: set parameters
- Testing: will test the cutting by cutting a small triangle
- Origin …
Note: when looking at the maching lower right is the origin of the machine
For the vinyl cutter I traced an image of a plant hopper in Inskape.
And also did some vinyl blue manta rays
Cool things that I learned:
Fusion:
- For fusion sketching I learned that you could do a circular pattern and replicate in different directions.
- I also found out the function projection which allows you to project a particular feature from one plane to another.
Inkscape/windows:
- 5 will bring the image to the front
- 3 bring what is selected
- Snapping tool
- Boolean operators
- Ctr A select all
