My son (age 10) had a last minute change of mind on his Halloween costume last week. Instead of being a clown, he wanted to be a knife-wielding “creepy guy” a la Freddy Kreuger or Jason from Friday the 13th.
I got home at 5:00 and we were due at a neighbor’s house at 5:45. Looking around for knives to start with, we settled on a 18" long machete that I had lying around in my shop. As it wouldn’t be a parenting “win” to send him trick-or-treating with it… enter the glowforge.
At 5:10 or so, we’d settled on the machete. Tried the trace function without much success (blade was too big and too shiny), so went to default mode of taking a picture with my phone at 5:17. Used my trusty VCarve Pro to trace the jpg image and turn it into a vector. Cleaned it up and sent the file to the Glowforge at about 5:25. Had a piece of proofgrade plywood handy, and since my file had included the mounting tangs for the blade to fit back in the handle, just needed to sand it a little and then it fit right back into the handle. Project finished at 5:32, went inside and had a quick meal of reheated leftovers, and then it was off to the neighbor’s house where we made it on time!
So it was a great success to go from “no idea what we are going to use” to “finished, serviceable prop” in 30 minutes or less.
