Lake depth coasters

[slackk1994]

Simply Spectacular! Well Done in deed!

[PrintToLaser]

Man, you put a lot of work into that. It shows!

[Jules]

Wow, that is super cool! Great job!

[jtbarrett]

Amazing!!

[osprey71]

@RogerM

I used a few strategic drops of superglue… Unfortunately the project has more than a couple glue laden fingerprints on it because I’m not so adept at this yet.

I found it best to leave the masking on everything as long as possible until assembly is done. I had some over-spill of glue on the protective paper of the acrylic on my project and wiped it off and there weren’t any marks.

The problem is, it is so tempting to tear that stuff off as soon as it comes out of the machine so you can see how beautiful it is.

[reliablepants]

This is very very cool. It also makes me think of @joshmillard’s layer stacking and wonder what other shapes might translate well into a set of stacked slices.

Some layer-stacking experiments

I’ve been thinking about layer-based stuff a bit the last few days, inspired in part by some of the work I’ve seen on the GF forums and from artists I follow elsewhere, and I wanted to futz with some stuff this morning. One idea: enclosing a stratified wooden sphere in a clear acrylic cube. Experiment was easy to mock up, results not thrilling me but I’ve got some more bits I want to try. Here’s the cut pieces – it’s a 1.25" cubed object cut from 1/8" acrylic and 1/8" plywood, made cut out as…

[Xabbess]

This is really marvelous! What a great technique and a wonderful gift.

[joshmillard]

Yeah, this kind of topographic treatment is really neat and is basically the same instinct motivating some of those bits. But I really like this whole project for tying the mechanical concept into a cohesive end product. Really nice work.

[Taolin]

Very clever design

[jcberry]

Excellent work!

[mantaray7]

I love seeing items like this, I cannot wait to get my Glowforge…
I would love to do one of these fo Lake Erie…

Thanks for sharing

Merry Christmas

[jay_h_daniel]

Great work Roger. A torch would polish up the top acrylic edges on your holder.

[RogerM]

@osprey71

I found it best to leave the masking on everything as long as possible until assembly is done. I had some over-spill of glue on the protective paper of the acrylic on my project and wiped it off and there weren’t any marks.

Duh… yes, of course… leave the masking on as long as possible. That makes complete sense and will be a best practice going forward. Thanks for this brilliant pro tip!

[RogerM]

@jay_h_daniel

Great work Roger. A torch would polish up the top acrylic edges on your holder.

Good idea. The box was tossed together as an afterthought and I clearly didn’t get the material thickness quite right, however, I hadn’t thought of using the torch on that. Great idea! How do you hold the box while you torch it?

[jay_h_daniel]

Pliers, or anything that won’t get your fingers toasted, just takes a light touch - practice with a scrap. Laser doesn’t cut a sharp line well, but it’s easy to correct.

Jay

[CharlesAndThatch]

This is top-notch, my friend! What a great idea, and gift. Your Mom will be sure to love that!

[bird2brain]

Question for any of the Pros: How do you accommodate the kerf? I’m guessing that if one used the same cutting path for both, the acrylic would fit too loosely. Same problem for notched boxes. Do you painstakingly adjust for all that, or hope it’s close enough (my approach so far)?

[caribis2]

In the Tips and Tricks section there are tutorials for this depending on your vector graphics editor of choice. For boxes there should be a kerf adjustment feature in the box generator.

I’ve only inlaid veneer, but have read that acrylic is not forgiving at all and you need to be very precise in your kerf adjustments. As regards boxes, I’ve snap fit a couple, but normally I’m going to glue them anyway so I don’t bother.

[ptodd]

Excellent work!

[onthewayhomecustomde]

where is the file?