I hope this is okay, because I took some inspiration from @cynd11 and her mini-clock. I thought it would be cool to make a mantle sized one, and then I decided to try stained glass with different colors acrylic, with a cheap LED light base underneath. Here is the result, and I am so happy with it! I’m giving it to my mom, cannot wait! Thanks to @Jules for the kerf tutorial, it was great! Although it was odd, some of the purple (yes those are purple, not blue) pieces fit, others didn’t. I think there are three different kerf values in there that ended up working. Anyway, thanks again forum peeps! Y’all are the best!
Oh, I would also like to add, recreating that pattern in Inkscape taught me so much. I’m currently thinking of trying to apply it to my gingerbread house this year (and I think it will totally work)
Thanks Jules! I cannot cut one more thing on that laser before attempting the cleaning of it, which I will do with your tutorial at hand. I’m very nervous about it because I am afraid I will break something. At this point, I’m so addicted to this thing I would be very sad if something goes awry. So my next project is studying and getting up my nerve so I can move on to lasering gingerbread. Fun!
Thanks! It’s actually an LED light base that fits underneath. I made an error in the clearance I needed so it doesn’t fit with the cord. But at least it also takes batteries.
makes me want to know if by recreate you mean you made it from scratch using rectangles and circles or if you did a bitmap trace of a pattern and then nudged it here and there. If the latter, then I would expect pieces to not fit so well. If the former, then I’m a bit surprised, but kerf can be confounding sometimes.
The reason I would expect a trace to not kerf-compensate all that well is because the more complex the shape the more problems the software has in making a perfect “shadow” of it. And a trace usually has extra nodes causing bumps and stuff. It gets really complicated really quickly. But that clock is amazing; you wound up with a wonderful piece.
Hi there, I recreated it using shapes and lines. I was surprised too, the red and yellow pieces fit perfectly. And the first three purple ones did too. Then there were just some that were way too small. I had to increase the kerf value on those from. 008 to. 01 to get them to fit, it was really odd. But of course, I haven’t had anything yet work on the first try, so I wasn’t surprised.