A lace making robot to tie little knots at specific distances and keep everything properly tight boggles the mind both in hardware and software. I suppose an embroidery machine working on a material that could dissolve away after could get close.
The grandmother of an ex-girlfriend became one of those unaccompanied minors escaping from 1917 Russia to New York only to never find the family she was supposed to meet up with and so became employed in lace making by hand for forty years and I met her in her nineties when she explained how they did it.
I learnt to make Honiton lace more than a few years ago, so that I could design fan patterns for lace makers, then sell them fan sticks that I made.
But that was another life !
The Nottingham Lace Museum also gave me free reign to take the covers off Heathcoar’s original bobbin net machine, when they discovered that I knew more about it than they did !
I had considered redesigning it specifically for fan leaves, but that was before I discovered the world of CNC.
John
That must feel like the armor maker who went into an armor museum and saw a suit of “original Medieval armor” and had to point out the maker’s mark he had put in when he made it.
I have been there sort of when talking to Antique Glass dealers, They usually have very little knowledge of how it was actually made and being able to recognise what was done was much fun, but that was a very different level.
Had to take my Sierpinski Carpet Experiment from level “4” to level “5”. One more set of extra-tiny holes. The precision of the Glowforge laser continues to amaze me!
Used GP medium draftboard with ~30 minute cut time. Removing the paper backing is tedious but 100% of the holes show perfectly now.
@rbtdanforth: If you look at the SVG file you may detect some “cheating” on my part. The original level-5 SVG file was this…
However the Glowforge GUI chokes on that. I ended up making a screen-shot of that, importing that bitmap into Inkscape, and then converting same into a path. If you look carefully you can see that some of the tiny square cut-outs are not so “square”. But once cut those imperfections are undetectable.
One day “Real Soon Now” (when I have “Lots of Free Time”) I’m going to write a Perl script to directly generate the SVG file in a form that Glowforge likes better—just lots of square boxes of varying sizes.
