Laser & vinyl cutters


For this week, the assignement was to make a press-fit construction using the lasercutter. I printed out a bunch of shapes and some connectors and corners. Alot of the initial time went into optimizing the slot size for the construction. I decided to go with cardboard because there was alot of it and i could play around with it. The settings which worked were 65% power, 15% speed and 100 PPI. I had to set the speed manually to get the desired speed but I got clean cuts with this with no fire :)

shapes connectors

  I tried first with some corners and connectors with 0.337" width but with that size the pieces didn't fit nicely because the cardboard wrinkled at the edges.

corners with small edges

 I then made them 0.557" in width and printed all the pieces. I made ALOT of pieces so i can play around. I printed parallelograms, triangles and curved pieces and lots of connectors.

Lots of pieces

The first thing i tried with the triangles was to make a tetrahedron, It kind of works but I realised again that the connectors and corners collapsed sometimes and wrinkled. I had put a little chamfer on the drawings but I think that with the small dimension made the pieces very easy to break. I still managed to get a stable tetrahedron.

tetrahedrontetrahedron 2
2D triangle
I then played around with the other shapes, I made a bad replica of the Eiffel tower. The bad corners I had made it impossible for it to be structurally stable in 3D so I made a 2D structure.

Eiffel tower ?
 I have a ton of pieces left so I can make alot 2D structures. Feel free to come and grab some.

 For the future, Be wary of the small pieces, they are hard to control.

 Here are the dwg files I used :

 Eiffel tower 1
 Eiffel tower 2
 Triangles
 Connectors
 Corners