Soooo, some of you may remember my laughable first attempt at making a scroll saw by hand with a jig saw (LOLOL!) I learned a great deal of respect for scroll saw artists last night - Update on 8/17/16 - #19 by nunzioc
Wound up with this:
And then I decided to try it with MUCH more precision, using a manual mill…which literally took me hours of tedious, hard work, and it still looked like crap, and it was destroyed in 1.5 seconds when I tried to resaw it into a thinner piece…
Well, what took me hours to manually turn into junk, takes the Glowforge LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES(!!) to turn out…PERFECTLY.
Now, even an unskilled layman such as myself can probably turn out perfect bowls in less time than it takes a master craftsman to stencil out their cuts! Well, maybe I’m getting too confident, but probably not far from the truth
Behold…
This is 1/4 inch Home Depot birch plywood…cut like BUTTER, by the mighty forge:
Let me back up, though, and give some more info…
I had made this in MSPaint (cause silly me des not yet know Fusion nor Ink; please go easy on me, lol), and had the forge scan it…
I had set it to 100 power and 20 speed, which was overkill, even on 1/4 inch…
On my first attempt, I chose to cut “Outside the lines”?, which produced a double cut (same as in the video with Adam Savage when it cut his hand drawn design, and it produced a thin frame):
The very thin lines and dashes that you see are when I tried to do a second function; engrave a line down the center of each piece so that I could inlay a strip of metal later, but I think I set the power too low & the speed too high…weird that it started to come out like that, and so I cancelled it…I got it working better later.
Here’s a closer pic of the cuts and the weird engraving attempt. Please keep in mind that the only reason the cuts are not perfectly “straightedge straight” is because of how MS Paint draws lines; I’m sure I would have gotten perfectly straight lines if I had drawn them by hand with a ruler, or used a real program like Fusion or Ink:
Here is a pic of the thin in between cuts…I definitely used too much power / too slow speed:
Here is the first attempt, loosely assembled. Notice how the extra pieces that were cut away in between each cut makes for a bowl with much more “open air space”:
For the second attempt, I changed a couple of things:
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I made it larger
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I chose the “inside” (?) of each line for the cut, which then produced only 1 cut per line, instead of the 2 cuts as in the first attempt
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I kept the power at 100, but increased the speed, to I think 30, maybe 35? I forget, should have written it down, lol. Hey, that gives me an idea for the hopper: @dan Can GF keep a record of our cuts, so that we can look them up again, later?! Would be soooo handy!
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I tried the same engrave settings at first, which was giving me the same weird dashes, so then I re-tried it with 50% power, slower speed, and less lines per inch resolution…
Notice how the bowl seems more “closed”; less air space:
Notice the 2nd type of engraving…this is what I wanted to begin with. I cancelled it after a bit, though, as this was just a test run, and it would have taken a long time to finish
Here they are side by side for comparison:
Eight layers of 1/4 inch thick made the bowls too shallow, so I put the pieces together to make the pieces 1/2 thick, and that was MUCH better. They are different sizes, so they look a little odd, but you get the idea:
From the side:
Hope you guys like this; I’ll update it as I make improvements / finalize this…