Laser Cutting

 So for Week 3 we did a laser cutting practical. Was really excited for it as I have never used or seen a laser cutter before! Before the practical we had to take a safety quiz and had to learn a lot about laser cutters and how they work as they could be quite dangerous. Using this knowledge, we have developed a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for the laser cutter. Heres what it is after the practical.

So as you can see the picture has our original SOP and while we were doing the practical we learnt a lot that you can't really learn unless you do it in real life and from the lecturers so we wrote down the new things we learnt. We went back and edited it so it looks a lot neater on this link : Improved SOP

The improved SOP should be able to fully describe how to use a laser cutter. Here is us following it to perform the laser cutting.

To begin using the laser cutter we have to firstly turn on three things, the air compressor, fume extractor and then the laser cutter. They will be different for each respective machine but they are essencial for safe usage of the machine with the air compressor and fume extractor helping remove dangerous gases while cutting.

After the machine has initialized, we can begin inserting our design. Saving the fusion designs as DXF files, we can insert it into the computer.

It will look something like this. To achieve the DXF file required you have to create a sketch in fusion 360 on the top of the piece so it saves the piece in a birds eye view so that the DXF file and in turn the laser cut will turn out in a desired way. When the piece is in here, as described in the SOP, we colour anything we want cut in red and anything we want engraved in green.

Before cutting though, we have to measure the thickness of your material, this will be important later as you have to adjust your parametric to make sure that the press-fit groove is around the same thickness as your material for it to fit. Also as improtant is that there are set settings in the laser cutter for certain materials like ofr example 3mm wood or 5mm acrylic and more along those lines. If a material is too thick or thin is placed with a wrong setting it could damage the machine.

After editing the 'Groovedepth' parametric to the same as the material thickness, we are able to get a good cut. We didn't need to engrave so we just set the outline of the image to be red.

After following step 3-8 of operation of laser cutter in the SOP, which is mostly adjusting settings for your vecotor or engraving cuts on that specific material and making sure the air suction and other safety funtions are on. We managed to get a few test pieces out.

Unfortunatly the cuts were not very good as we did not account for kerf and the pieces were too loose. After making adjusments we were able to get a good fitting test piece so then we started to cut our press fit kit.

Here are the pieces we cut.

This is the test piece!

Originally, we wanted to make a dome kit. Something like this.

We realised that it was too hard to assemble and thus we decided to use the pieces the build something else. We decided to combine the struts 6 way circle and triangle to build some creative works.

I guess you can call this our version of a dog and a dog bowl. Personally I think it looks pretty good.

Some shots of my groupmate Lionel holding up our work.

Reflection

All in all even though we didn't get to achieve the dome kit we wanted, we at least got a pretty nice kit that we can be happy about. I really leant a lot about laser cutting from this practical. I used to think that it is very complicated to laser cut but after using it during the practical I found it really simple, fun and efficient to use. With the system already having the set settings for specific materials it makes it really easy to use. This practical wasn't all smooth sailing though. For starters we measured our material thickness wrong and our test fit could not really work so that's one thing. Another thing is that our first Fusion file model didn't use parametic and thus we could not adjust for the different material. Really shows the amount of preplanning needed to do laser cutting. Besides from that our product at the end was nice. I think laser cutting is a really effective tool to use which is better than traditional cutting methods like handsaw or the saw machine. The laser cutter can cut very precisely and allow of rmore intricate designs. Maybe we could use it in our final product when we are designing maybe the casing or other parts.

Extras, Models and half dome!

Here are our Fusion files and my attempt at the dome.

And heres the attempt at the dome I tried to build at home.

Well unfortunatly I did not bring back enough pieces and the dome grooves were not deep enough to hold very well but im still pretty happy the shape and angles turned out well and I can see it forming.

Well thats it for the blog. More projects to come soon!