Testing out some materials with the laser

     Today I went into the lab to do some test cuts on materials I had purchased for the first project.  Erica was the tech today and she was super helpful! She showed me that she had a little box of materials she had cut/ etched little tests on and was pretty stoked to do tests on wood she hadn't seen laser cut before. 

    I was a little early and something was in the laser cutter already so I showed her my materials and also ran my ideas for my project through her. I expressed my concerns about working with inlaying materials and having them match up, which was part of the reason I wanted to visit the lab today. She let me know that earlier someone had been trying the same thing with inlays, and that they were having a lot of trouble getting the tolerance just right with wood, though acrylic you can basically get perfect every time after a few tests. This kind of cements my thought that for now it might be best to just stick with offset cuts glued together. I am really thankful that I have a bit more time to work on this.

Anyways, after having my boring "TEST" cut out of latex I wanted to have something slightly more interesting to use as my cutting/etching pattern. I asked my friend who is a Twitch streamer to send one of her logos over as a vector file because apparently she has them but she didn't, possibly because she doesn't actually realize how cool laser cutting is. I decided on the Nine Inch Nails logo since over the past week my best friend and I have been joking about putting it on unlikely things. I figured it would work well because a) it's simple to make up a vector of (took me all of about 6 minutes) b) there's a place to test both etching and cutting and c) it would work well for testing tolerance between different materials as the parts could be swapped out. Plus now I can attach them to increasingly unhinged items and send photos to my friend.

A recent photo of me with the unreasonably large patch my friend got me years ago. This sparked the current conversation of NIN-branded everything.

The borders were etched at the following percentages

    The acrylic results are a bit hard to see when photographed due to the iridescent nature of the material. Erica also let me know that they can be cleaned up a bit with a gentle cleaner-she recommended headlight cleaner. We did three tests- one with the plastic covering still stuck to it, one with the bare acrylic, and one with masking tape over top. The test with the plastic adhered got a bit melty and bubbly in places where the plastic melted- it was the worst. The one with just the acrylic wound up hazing quite a bit but Erica was pretty sure it would most likely clean off with headlight cleaner. The one with the masking tape was the best, however the etching at 25% was not visible and 50% is barely visible.

    For the most part the wood tests went well. The black limba turnout out especially well. Sadly the birch plywood from the bookstore is now ruined for me after buying nice wood.

The bubinga was another story. It's such nice wood but there was some difficulty! First of all, all my wood was too long for the laser cutter so I was making due with scoring it deep with an exacto knife then breaking it but the bubinga was so tough I had to use metal shears! I will have to take it to the actual woodshop to cut in the future. The the light- when it was getting laser cut it was SO BRIGHT like a welding arc or something. It etched super dark all over but didn't cut all the way through. Erin flipped the piece over and we retried the back, only she went over it with the laser cutter 9 TIMES and it was just barely almost not really cut through. We tried again on a second piece, turning the etching down to 75% of what we had used last time and the laser power up from what it was on (I think 45%?) to 65% and went over it 4 times. That seemed to do the trick, though the etching was still super duper dark. It smelled really nice after it was burnt though, maybe a bit like cloves or cinnamon.

Anyways, that was a lot to think about. Plus, it was fun! I'm glad Erin was just as excited as me to test out the different materials.

I feel like these are ready to burst out of a goth piñata