I have been thinking about exactly this same idea!
My wife has a little die cutting press that a neighbor gave her, and it came with a bunch of pre-made dies.
Looking at them I don’t think scoring would be enough, but if you cut through 1/8" plywood and then layer it on another sheet it might work.
Die rule (the cutting strips) is kind of hard to come by in small quantities unfortunately.
I have been looking for a local place that has cut off bits they might be willing to part with but no luck yet.
The foam ends up being important. Without it the paper just gets jammed up into the die and is hard to get out without trashing it.
Glad to hear! I’ll certainly watch for what people come up with here until I’ve got a Glowforge to try some things on my own.
Feeling pretty good about it working now. Cut a shape twice, one bigger than the other. Use the smaller shape to wrap the metal around and form it. Slip it into the hole left by cutting out the shape, minus the slightly bigger shape to allow room for the metal. Then, it’ll be a matter of working out the foam. I need to look more into that, but there’s laser safe stuff and I’m just happy to have a better idea of what might work than I did before saying anything.
Another source is the metal strapping that they use to bind stuff on pallets. I have seen it piled behind behind the big box stores. Or even thin hacksaw blades, which would probably hold up for quite a while
You mean, like, 3 passes cutting a half-inch piece or something? Or scoring multiple passes to make the score wider? Either way is probably worth at least the experimentation.
@Jules mentioned that the cut is the shape of an X. if you focus the center of that X lets say on the top of the material does anybody know the angle? From what I have seen it seems very minimal.
If you focus on the surface of the material, you would get a cut shaped like a cone, but with the wider part of the cone at the base of the material and the point at the top.
You also run the chance of not cutting all the way through if you are running too fast.
It can be a fairly significant difference. I didn’t write them down though - I’m sorry. I just remembered noticing how off the kerf adjustments were between the top and the bottom of the piece. (Like double the kerf.)
It’s still not a lot with a kerf of 0.2 mm, but it does affect the fit on inlay.
Maybe a little of both. Cutting a couple of scores right next to each other would give you the width for the whole power of the beam to get down to a deeper level, and multiple passes would likely mean more width because more char. My guess is that the metal is probably thicker than the 8-mil nominal kerf, but as you say it would probably take some experiments.
in the pic you can see the angle of the cut. With the laser you would nee to cut twice and compensate for kerf each time, and if possible focus the beam on the top for one and the bottom for the other. Again the trick to using it will be to get the top and bottom lined up perfect with the material in between.
I will be testing this for sure!
I have a great little corner-rounding cutting press-die. The dies are swappable, although I only have the one right now. I wonder if I could leverage it (!) to work with a glowforge-made die. Maybe an embossing die? Maybe use the basic idea to make a differently shaped press? Still playing with the idea.
I think it would depend a lot on what you were cutting. For paper you need sharp edges. (IIRC the 3-hole punch I inherited has a hollow ground into the punches, fwiw)
I’ve been giving some thought to embossing dies as well. I’m curious to experiment with engraved acrylic, especially when the emboss doesn’t have to have a lot of depth.
We have steel rule dies made for gaskets and similar stuff we make at work for R&D applications. Our source is a local company that primarily cuts gaskets and subcontracts out the dies themselves to another company, so we pay more than the actual cost. Even then, a small die with a rectangular outer die and the features show below runs about $130 to have made. We use these to cut through composite gaskets made of closed cell foam and UHMW sheets, to a total thickness of around 3-3.5 mm, so they are pretty tough.
