Creating accurate house roofs

@timmystreehouse Thanks for the explanation of when you do the material thickness overhang (and why you don’t like it), the kiss cut technique, and the beveled edge technique! These details are so important to a piece :slight_smile:

Also, yes, feel free to send my Gabled Dormer Cuttle project to whomever you want. Also let me know if you’d like any tweaks to it. I’m in the process of adding a roof overhang parameter, and making it use pitch as a proportion of run / rise instead of degrees.

Now the fun part: for using a laser cutter to make angled cuts (bevels or miters), I have a lot of experience with this. My wife and I made these crystals from acrylic. It was aesthetically important that the cuts meet crisply at the edges. (More documentation on this project.)

We actually developed jigs which would hold the piece at an angle (!) while in the laser cutter. In the below photo, the edge running along the right is being prepped to cut at an angle.

This was epically difficult but we got it working and the above crystals were all made using this technique with lots of jigs. (This was on a non-Glowforge laser cutter, which had a bit more vertical clearance than the Glowforge.)

Since that time I have learned a much easier technique, which is to use a disk sander (e.g. like this) with an adjustable table.

You simply set the table of the sander to your desired angle. It has degree markings on it (but I’d also use a digital angle protractor to verify). I found this technique in an article by George Hart who makes amazing geometric sculptures with laser cutting and other techniques.

I definitely recommend this technique for making angled cuts!

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Hey, that’s Vi Hart’s dad!

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True fact!

I added overhang parameters to my Gabled Dormer project. Here it is, cut from cardstock:

And this diagram shows the parameters you can change:

Let me know what you think :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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very cool

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