I’ve mentioned my tape sandwich method before:
Mask your material.
Cut.
Apply blue painters tape to the entire surface before you remove the material.
Remove taped-up piece, all the cut parts should come with it.
Flip and tape the other side. Now you have a tape sandwich.
Thanks, it’s a variant on a previous project. I revisited the model to refine my “semi parametric cutsheet” methodology in Inkscape. (which may be the subject of a future post… hint, it’s about clones and clever node placement)
and I applied the same “spikiness” to a dodecahedron model I made when I did the basic platonic solids way back when I first got the GF.
I keep thinking I will switch over to using Inkscape for more things. The extra fiddlyness on a Mac tends to discourage me but, I keep seeing you making great use of it.
I’ll admit Inkscape on the mac isn’t as seamless, I tried to help a buddy get it going once, and it was pretty janky by comparison.
That may have had something to do with his specific mac, but idk, it was definitely not ideal. These days I am using it on a laptop with a 4k screen, and it doesn’t handle scaling gracefully, so it’s not exactly pristine even for me. I await the 1.0 release, it’s supposed to address the high-resolution scaling issue.
I do have an (un)reasonably powerful Windows machine available, too. It’s on my local network but, not on my desk. I wonder how Inkcape would do over RDP. I may try that.
EDIT: In the interest of not derailing the thread any further, I’ll just note here that it seems perfectly workable over RDP to a fast Windows machine. Thanks for the push!
Cool weeding trick. That’s much more efficient than my demasking and cleaning with ammonia afterwards. I had just done another 1000 of those tokens engraved both sides, and was all proud of that method - not to have to weed two sides of 1000 tokens.
No problem, but bear in mind that the following conditions have to be true:
Whatever tape you use:
must be strong enough to withstand pulling it up without tearing.
has to adhere to the masking more strongly than the masking adheres to your cut material.
As such, I wouldn’t try this with blue tape on very smooth things like acrylic, where the masking grabs on hard. For that I’d want to use some very sticky packing tape, probably. For Baltic birch, though, it’s a game changer.
I got a free monitor that is something like 30 feet wide (okay, not sure its true width, but very, very wide) and if I take Inkscape from maximized to not maximized it freezes. Not sure if that is what you mean by not scaling gracefully.
Is stepping on a Lego not painful enough? Do I have the solution for you.
Holy Sheet