Sophie Longawa

HTMAA - Final Project

Laser Cut Prototype

Cardboard Construction Kit

Materials: Epilog Laser Cutter | Rhino 3D | 3/16 Corrugated Cardboard

I created a cardboard construction kit pleisiosaur to visalize how the form looks in 3D space. It's difficult to find files for the specific species I'm looking for, so I scrapbooked components (spines, ribs) from other dinosaurs, cleaned up the details, and added pleisiosaur-specific parts such as fins. To finalize the cardboard construction kit, I reformatted and tetrised the parts to save space, added champfers to all joins for easy insertion, changed dimensions and cleaned up curves. An important step in the process wasing using Rhino's scale command to fit the file to the size of the material.

I laser cut on 24x36' inch 3/16ths corrugated cardboard. I had to run the file twice because the laser didn't fully cut through the material the first time, but even on the 2nd attempt I had to do some post-processing with a box cutter to remove a thin onion layer. The following settings were sucessful: 25/25/500 speed/power/frequency, altered from the recommended 30/15/500, with the laser focused at 2 in.

Final Product