You could cut some kind of picture frame for them on the 'Forge, or cut/slot some panels of a box in such a way as to use them as inserts.
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I am headed back to Seattle with a carry-on box full of veneer and hardwood scraps from my fatherâs stash. He had a woodworking business for most of my youth, and like me is a bit of a pack rat.
I canât wait to see what I can do with these small bits, and if it all works out well I might need to ship some boxesâŚ
Kind of the feeling I got when my pal, foreman at a high end custom veneer company, told me I could dumpster dive whenever I wanted.
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Thatâs a great friend to have!
If we canât engrave the hard drive discs, they do make an excellent starting point for a wind chime. They are quite musical when suspended & struck.
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Can we be friends? Iâll mail you empty boxes 
Iâve also heard they make decent frisbees ⌠Until you try and catch it
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YesâŚthey sound lovely. I have them in a mobile right now. The background in this room is too âbusyâ and itâs difficult to see what one is looking at in a photoâŚbut here are a couple of shots. The various reflections make it interesting. You can see my hand holding my phone in them.
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Love the alligator clips! Good idea!
When I took the disks out of the drives, I was curious about what they are made of so I went online to find out. I read one comment by a guy who said, thinking they were made out of metal, he tried using both hands to bend one and it shattered into thousands of pieces of glassâŚand he had to have 30 stitches in his fingertips.
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Those make for a good revolving show of various itemsâŚdepending on the mood.
Lovely work! Now, Iâm going to have to dig up my box of them and make some more with some of the clock gears & other misc. parts I have.
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Back when write able CD-ROMS were the method of transferring data/test installation media I probably destroyed a hundred of them (canât throw them out because the competition could be dumpster diving we were told.) Palm it, put your hand in a waste basket, turn your head away and squeeze. You got good at knowing just when it was going to break and then it shattered into a couple of big pieces and lots of shards. Never cut myself, but when it reached the breaking point I didnât press too much harder. It could sting a little.
I read that post, confused, three times before I realized you said âsqueezeâ not âsneezeâ. Allergy seasonâŚ
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Hobby places in Wisconsin (Hobby Lobby) sell bags of leather scraps for under $10. they have a website and shipping might not be horrific.
I have a pile of pretty hardwood veneers from a place that was going out of business. Anyone have experience on how much kerf I should be allowing when I do the designs?
My wife uses heavy colored paper to make needle point projects. She uses a laser to cut small, thread-sized holes (few 1/00s of an inch) in them and then she cuts them into shapes. She teaches classes in how to needle point the patterns of holes into pretty, interesting patterns (snowmen, pumpkins, ornaments, etc).
Our main goal in getting a GF is so that she can cut down her design cycle for new projects (it takes a lot of trial and error to design something and having your own laser saves lots of time).
It is very hard to avoid getting soot on the white paper. The best way, I have found, is to put some clean paper beneath it and then carefully adjust power and speed so that it just cuts through the project material.
My material of choice is 1/8" plywood (get it in 4â sheets at the hardwood store and cut it to fix). I also buy blank boxes from Michaelâs and etch patterns into them.
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It will vary by species, thickness of veneer, and other factors - unfortunately youâll just have to try and see. At design time, you might consider using your stroke to represent the kerf. Then you set your stroke width equal to the measured kerf. FInally you use outline stroke, delete the inner one, and you have your cuts at size + kerf/2 on each side.
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Ah. That will probably work better than the outset/inset thing I was planning to do in inkscape. In the longer term, any plans to have the camera deal with part or all of this by making a few test cuts?
We did a great deal of research before concluding it wasnât possible to do it automatically for unknown materials. But if you use Glowforge-purchased materials, you can ignore all that and weâll be able to manage kerf for you.
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