Cont. I'm Puzzled - Chipboard and Photo Paper

This is just a guess from cutting other stuff, but if you can dial in the settings just right, cutting upside down might leave a kerf so thin it’s hard to believe. And barely tough whatever your sacreficial layer is.

Want to try!

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I don’t find the Glowforge to be loud… until I get a phone call. Then it seems loud.

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Even then it doesn’t seem bad. I’m able to have a normal phone conversation standing right over it.

You are probably running the exhaust out a window, and not through 18’ of rigid ducting with a booster fan!

My hard-surface floors and walls with no windows probably don’t help either. Certainly doesn’t seem as loud as our little hand-held Dyson… that thing shrieks!

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You would be correct. Included hose just dropped out the window giving the jasmine a constant breeze.

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I guess the purpose of testing is to stay consistent. I didn’t. This is actually a metallic photo paper that I cut upside down with a piece of thin backer board on the honeycomb (and mounted to the same chipboard). I probably had the speed a hair low (dropped to 180) and I could see pin holes in the sacrificial paper.

Some of the cuts came through really nice and you can barely see that a cut is there. Other parts (the majority) seemed to ablate some of the photo paper leaving more chip visible.

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Love that metallic effect! :grinning: (Gosh, you’ve got some gorgeous papers.)

When I ran cuts to test for focal point, I pretty consistently saw a much narrower kerf on the underside than I did on the top, when the FP was set on the surface of the material.

That shows a very narrow kerf on a few of the pieces, which I would expect, but a lot of them look pretty wide - do you think that’s because the paper was metallic and reflecting the heat around so a wider path got ablated? (Just mildly curious. It’s unexpected.) :slightly_smiling_face:

Great job on it again.

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The metallic paper is incredible. It needs the right lighting (diffused instead of accent/point lighting) but you get that right and it’s phenomenal.

I believe the way that they make it is with a very thin Mylar layer just beneath the paper surface that accepts the pigment. Even though it’s a very, very thin layer of it - I think Mylar is kind of melty, isn’t it?

Here I make stuff up. So, in this case, you’re needing enough power to cut through all of the material, but Mylar is sensitive to the power used to cut it. Perhaps 2 passes of faster and lower power would work better with this particular type of paper. From a production standpoint, that’s not a great alternative.

I haven’t really considered using this paper for my products - just another print I had laying around. But, if I could get all of the cuts like the clean ones, a “metallic” series would be cool and worth an upcharge.

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WOW!:glowforge::grinning::thumbsup:

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Yeah, mylar is melty…my only exposure to it is sealing bags by melting it together. Maybe the two faster passes at lower power would work better for that.

I would be worth experimenting with for sure. Wow! is right.

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Oh, and the puzzle cut from metallic was generated using the script written by @Draradech!

His post on it is:

And the link is:
https://cdn.rawgit.com/Draradech/35d36347312ca6d0887aa7d55f366e30/raw/b04cf9cd63a59571910cb226226ce2b3ed46af46/jigsaw.html

Everything came through as one compound path - I released the compound paths and it actually cut line by line, like I was hoping (I also changed the strokes on the rows, columns and border, so I could order them separately)! The other generator I used creates compound paths out of line segments - and the Glowforge picks up on this (from the SVG code) and it sporadically jumps around.

Awesome job, @Draradech!

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I have to wonder how it would have turned out image-side up. Maybe the same if the meltyness is the dominant problem.

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@smcgathyfay would know. She does a lot of mylar work.

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Did this one create uniquely shaped pieces?

Moderately unique (and it also has some options to play with). I don’t know how much uniqueness you’ll get out of a generator, honestly. I think it would work quite well for smaller piece counts/easier puzzles.

Ultimately, from a design stand point, hand drawn is going to get you further along from a uniqueness perspective than generated. It’s just significantly more work.

Sorry - didn’t mean to ignore this. No, I haven’t tried it and probably won’t, just for the fact of how much it would cost to do.

Another option though would be adhesive photo paper. I know Epson and HP both make adhesive-backed photo papers.

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How did you cut the chipboard down to fit into the Glowforge?
Circular table saw? Were multiple pieces cut at same time?

I’ve used a circular saw with a Kreg guide but I usually just use the Logan mat cutter I have with the straight-edge cutter.

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and honestly, a couple of cuts with a really sharp exacto knife and a t square or ruler works fine, too.

It only really matters how you cut something down if you care about one of the edges.

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