I am pretty new to laser cutting and engraving and jumped in pretty hard with a glowforge pro and a red and black 80w. Been having fun on both, have not created my own stuff yet having to much fun with what i find, i am building a scale carnival ride right now, i got svg from a website, but now want to make more rides and there is no good carnival ride svg online so i have to make my own, i have lightburn software and soon corel draw is that good enough to start making models and is there an easy way to take a picture of something and transform the front facing part of the picture into a flat file somehow? or i need measurments of new ride i want to make and scale it, i have to add thousands of tabs to hold it all together, Basicly what i am asking is what is best software to do this. I am making a 56" ZIPPER Carnival ride that actually runs with lights and motors and all.
My current carnival ride
Do you use Proofgrade materials for these? If so, do you sand off the finish before you glue the pieces together? Or maybe you use unfinished wood and finish after you glue it?
Wow very nice!!
How you doing this
I use the file that dink2344 shared with us at the top of this post to cut the pieces out of plywood. The pieces are just a bunch of flat wavy shaped plywood circles. You then take each one of the wavy circles and stack them upon themselves and place glue where the waves overlap each other. The end result is just flat plywood circles that stack up to build a bowl.
Thank you
Yup, just takes a little patience and a good eye with some dabs of super glue to put together. From cut to finish is about 15-20 minutes.
Thanks dink2344…The tiny bowl that I made took about 35-40 minutes for me to glue under a magnifying glass. It was fun and rewarding in the end. I wanted to see how small a bowl would be feasible out of your design. Thanks again for posting the free design for the community. I wish that the forum would allow for people to ask to share their designs in the Free Designs category. It just kind of strikes me as strange that the community is all about sharing, but taboo on asking people for their designs. Folks in the forum could always just say no, if they are interesting in keeping the designs for personal use, or profit. I totally get that!!! I just want the forum to try and share more things. After all, it just make the forum a better place for sharing and inspiration. Thanks again for your post. YOU ROCK!!!
Check out this mod on a wonderful design that was offered in the free files section. I can’t thank them enough!!! Thank you all for sharing and making this community an awesome place for our fellow Glowforge owners!!!
That’s beautiful! I may be a little biased, being an old Navy man, myself…
Did you cut out the Navy emblem, as well? It makes the project by itself…
I just used acrylic and ask the GF for a 3D engrave on the U.S. Navy logo. It turned out great when placed over the Medium Blue Acrylic for the background. Thank you for your service to our great nation robermar36!!!
Oh, I reversed the image for the best effect on the clear acrylic when placed on top of the blue acrylic. I love this Glowforge!!
It looks like a cut out “medallion”…turned out great.
I agree. Most people got the GF to make money (me included) and they see giving stuff away as losing possible profit. Sharing my files doesn’t cost me anything. I would just hope that if people are using my files for profit (or just general use) that they send some credit my way. I enjoy creating new fun things and feel like I’m only scratching the surface on what I can do. Coming up with ideas is the tough part.
First of all, Thank you sooo much for sharing your file! I’ve only had my gf for a few weeks, and am very anxious to make anything and everything! I will be making a bowl out of pg wood, but what do you think about making one out of acrylic, would it work the same? I don’t want to waste materials so I thought I’d ask what you thought first.
Thanks again!!
Acrylic works fine.
It’s referred to above.
This topic has a long discussion about generating such a pattern.
My advice, just play with it. You’re gonna have to go through a lot of material to get the hang of things. Some will be wasted, some won’t. The more you do the better you’ll get. I love working on files. If you need help, feel free to hang out in our discord (linked in original post) and ask questions. I’m happy to help you tweak your files.
Thank you so much! I will keep trying to learn as much as I can, and I appreciate your offer to help! I’m sure I’ll take you up on it at some point!
Brandi