Practical cuts

I’d love to see everyone’s less artistic side come out a bit. What do you have that you cut for a specific purpose? I needed a 7.5cm VESA mount for my monitor, so I cut one:

What ya got?

69 Likes

Drawer organizers:

68 Likes

Cool! :grinning:

2 Likes

Toilet wrench – I’m sure this was exactly what Dan had in mind when he started this…

image

74 Likes

Did you design these by hand or was there a particular tool you used to take the drudgery out of it? I am looking to do something like this for organizing components in board game boxes.

3 Likes

Here’s one I did awhile ago: acrylic box to hold the cats’ water bowl so they don’t tip it over:

11 Likes

Yes, I started with a boxes.py TypeTray (Gallery - Boxes.py). It lets you choose rows and columns and as you can see I wanted a different number of rows for many columns. So I picked the max rows and columns I would want and then merged some of them in Inkscape.

I started with the bottom since that was a simple delete and helped visualize what I needed to do to the other pieces (replace slots with finger holes, shorten some pieces, etc.)

Using Inkscape’s “Align and Distribute” to overlay duplicates that had the required elements already in the right place and delete the rest was very helpful.

I usually use Fusion 360 for dimensional parts like this, but this seemed quicker since festi’s script does a bunch of stuff automagically. It’s open source too, so another way to go would be to make a new generator script based on typetray.py that is more custom.

11 Likes

Did you glue those in place? Or is there some other joinery?

2 Likes

They’re both just press fit. The one on the left is pretty dang tight. I had to use a mallet to put it together. The one on the right is only tight in the tenons, not in the finger joints so needs some glue. Someday, I’ll take it apart and glue it back together.

Glue is one of the interesting difficulties. Normally wood glue is the choice for these kind of finger joints. It’s cheap, really strong and easy to clean up. However, I’ve heard that it has a hard time adhering to the laser cut edge so I think a lot of people use CA glue. I haven’t done much testing yet to decide.

1 Like

Another factor to consider with the glue is that wood glue you actually want a glue gap (just leave the kerf or maybe even bigger). CA not so much.

2 Likes

Exactly indeed.

9 Likes

Drill template for asssembling my laser table.
image

Bracket for holding the shelf dividers down on my laser table.

Bracket for the tool tube on my motorcycle. This one is made of Delrin machined on a CNC machine, but I laser cut some prototypes out of draftboard to get the design down, and a final prototype out of acrylic before switching to the Delrin.

image

Not pictured:

  • Holder for some chemical dispensers I use on my bench
  • Drawer tray to hold some of my knife collection
  • A set of rectangles proportional to various items in my home lab. These were used to plan a remodel / relayout.
25 Likes

I just made a hook that attaches to my monitor to hold my other pair of glasses. (I wear bifocals, but for the computer I have reading glasses so I don’t sit staring at the screen with my head tipped back. )

5 Likes

Picture or it never happened! :slight_smile:

5 Likes

I cut it out of a used piece of BB, so the curves go off the edge of the material in a few places. Just imagine that it’s perfectly proportioned. :wink:

22 Likes

That makes sense. I’m a wood worker by education and wood glue is usually the best for wood because it bonds it together on a molecular level and leaves it super strong. (Except on the endgrain. Face grain to face grain is the strongest bond). CA works well for light duty items but it’s very brittle and will break with a modest amount of force. Epoxy is probably the best for anything that will be handled often. As a very general rule the longer the epoxy’s cure time the stronger the bond it will have, but for something like this a 5 minute epoxy will do fine.

7 Likes

Needed a handful of washers for some clearance on an electrical box for a solar array install. Had to remind my husband that he didn’t need to go to Lowe’s to pick something up, we have a freaking laser ;p 30 seconds in Inkscape later, perfectly fit clear acrylic lifter/washers complete!

11 Likes

Did a projector mount that wasn’t designed for the replacement projector:

https://community.glowforge.com/t/it-died-found-an-old-one-but-things-were-lost?source_topic_id=16019
4 Likes

Oh yeah, I remember this post! Great stuff.

1 Like

Dental pick tray:

Ply tray, balsa dividers just to see how it would work. I wouldn’t recommend balsa, it’s super for this. If I redid this, I’d make the finger holes bigger, it’s still a bit tough to get the picks out. Learning experience!

16 Likes