Categories
Uncategorized

Turndrawble Pen Holder

Pen Holder

If you remember reading about my Turndrawble, the turntable-based drawing machine, you may remember that I use Fine Point Sharpies with it. The last time I used it in public I just had the pens in a jar, which is not ideal.

The original design was going to have the pen holder built in, but I changed things and decided against that, so I needed something else, and this is it.

If you want to see this thing in person, and make some art with it, I’ll be at the Hidden River Art Festival at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts on September 19th & 20th, 2015.

Wood

The wood pieces are cut from 1/4″ Baltic Birch plywood. The blue parts are set to cut before the black parts. You usually want to cut the insides of things first. (Often this leads to many colors if you nest objects.) Not all laser cutter software requires you to do this manually. Some software is smart enough to always cut the inside objects first.

Acrylic

I also cut some rectangular acrylic panels to go on the inside. Two red, and two black, to match the Turndrawble acrylic colors used.

Pen Holder

I glued the wood pieces together with wood glue, sanded them, and did a stain and polyurethane coat. (Next time it would be better to sand everything completely before assembly. The sanding removed some of the burned wood look, which I wanted to preserve.

Pen Holder

The acrylic pieces fit nice and snug, but just to be safe I put a few small dabs of hot glue on the before putting them in place. There’s also four rubber feet on the bottom to prevent sliding around on the table.

Pen Holder

Pen Holder

(You can read more about this thing on the Turndrawble project page..)

Categories
Uncategorized

Lasers and Boxes

Since we’ve got a laser cutter at Milwaukee Makerspace, I wanted to test out the BoxMaker and cut a box out of wood.

BoxMaker

BoxMaker is a sweet little web app that lets you put in the dimensions and spits out a PDF file with what you need. I wanted a box 3″ x 5″ by 2″ and for the material thickness, I got out the digital calipers and took a measurement. (Take note of this! The material thickness is important later on…)

BoxMaker

So here’s the PDF file I got. Depending on the size of your material (or how much you want to waste) it may make sense to move the pieces around. Since I imported the PDF file into CorewDraw (which is what the laser uses to cut things) it was fairly easy to rearrange the pieces. I also deleted the text that describes the box. I could have just made it a color the laser cutter ignores, but I figured I had the info in the original PDF file.

Wood

Now, our laser cutter is 25 watts, but since it’s old and may need some cleaning, it might not be outputting 25 watts, so when I put my thin piece of wood into the laser cutter, MattN mentioned that it wouldn’t cut it. I figured I’d give it a try, and yeah, even though I did multiple passes and tried to refocus the laser, it just couldn’t do it. I kept checking the depth of the cut, but it just wasn’t “cutting” it. (Pun intended!)

At this point I was fine with the failure to cut wood, and I knew the laser cutter could handle acrylic, so I grabbed a piece of that…

Cut Acrylic

The laser got through the acrylic just fine, as it’s done before… but wait, what did I say about the material thickness before? I said you needed to measure it! Since the acrylic was thinner than the wood, I should have generated a new file, but I didn’t. So this is what I got…

Finished Box

Here’s my box, with the tabs way too big, which gives it an interesting look I suppose. Not exactly what I was after, but at least I know that it works… mostly.

I also want to try a box with the T-joints like the MakerBot uses. Box-o-tron looks like it will work, if I can get it running. (Any other suggestions?)

Also, I had a fun time trying to photograph clear acrylic, so it wasn’t a total loss. :)