Week 1: Laser/Vinyl Cutting

Laser Cutting

For the laser cutting assignment, I was thinking about what I could make that would be useful for my daily life. I considered a few different options -

• A phone holder for my bike
  • Thinking through, this would probably require atleast a couple of parts to be 3D printed? (the cylindrical connector to snap on to the bike handlebars)

• A monitor stand for my new desk at Harvard’s GSD

• A foot-stool for my kitchen

I decided to go ahead with the foot-stool since I had just moved into a new place where there were a bunch of open shelves in the kitchen, but they were super high up.

As someone who is 6”2’ (not flexing, I swear), I didn’t really face any challenges with this but my girlfriend found it much harder to grab anything from the top two shelves. Making the stool would also win me brownie points with her, so it was an easy choice to make.

Understanding Measurements

The first job at hand was to understand what the dimensions of this stool needed to be. From my memory off-hand, I recalled that the distance between two shelves was probably around 1 foot (12 inches). I wanted a small stool that could be stowed away in the kitchen easily, so I thought a 9-inch high stool would suffice and do the job. I used a cutting board to visually understand what the height would look like.

I also used the cutting board to understand a comfortable width the stool would need. I put both my feet apart in a comfortable position and found it was ~11 inches. Adding an extra inch for safety, I decided the stool should be 12 inches wide.

Form Sketching

To start off, I wanted to explore a few interesting forms to consider for this stool - particularly organic (rounded) forms and push the boundaries of what I thought laser cutters can achieve.

<image of sketches coming soon>

Modeling in Fusion 360

I parametrized the height and width of my sketch in fusion 360 so i’m able to change it later - I then drew half of the entire shape I wanted along the origin since I intended to use the revolve tool to create a fully symmetrical stool around the Z axis.

I then used the revolve tool to create the full design along the Z axis

I then imported my .obj into the Slicer for Fusion 360 program - I played around with the number and angle of slices - finally settling on these settings

This resulted in needing to laser cut 6 sheets of 24x18in cardboard, which I did at the SEAS makerspace.

After cutting all the parts, putting them was pretty straightforward with instructions from the slicer app.

The final result wasn’t particularly stable when confronted with shear stress (it’s wobbly) because there weren’t enough Z slices presumably. The cardboard we had available was also not of great quality. A real-life use test remains and is coming soon ( i want to laser cut a lid before standing on it)

Vinyl Cutting

For the Vinyl Cutting portion, I wanted to create something that paid homage to my hometown, Bangalore. I’m a huge fan of Bengaluru FC, Bangalore’s soccer club, so I decided to do it’s logo as a full color sticker but since there were no clear instructions on how to do it, I had to figure it out on my own, and with help from the TFs and my classmates.

I really wanted to retain the colors, so I used the sublimation printer to print the logo out. I deliberated if I should first print, then cut the vinyl or cut then print the vinyl for a bit and cutting first seemed like the right choice since it would likely be extremely difficult to figure what lines to cut across after printing.

After the heat transfer, the sublimation paper was stuck to the vinyl, so I had to scrape it off under running water, and to my pleasure, the sticker looked amazing, and it lined up surprisingly well with the underlying cuts!

The final result was shockingly good!