I need to make plastic plugs for my Jeep Grand Cherokee luggage rack. The bolt holes in the sides of the thing, make it whistle as it goes down the road. I know I could probably just remove the rails, but I use it when I cart the family and all of their gear on vacations. If I made plastic plugs that snapped into the holes, it would solve that annoying problem. I can’t wait until my Glowforge arrives!
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If you need to end the whistling before the glowforge arrives…
I was looking in the assorted hardware drawers at an Ace hardware store while trying to solve a similar problem, except that my whistling was coming from the open ends of the square tubing I used to modify my rack. I found plastic plugs there that fit well, but had a tendency to pop out if touched by hands or branches, until I put a dab of adhesive into the ribs.
I also found one that fit perfectly into the end of my hi-lift jack tube, which was whistling as well, looked like this:
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JB, that’s awesome. I may scrounge around the hardware store, then. Much appreciated!
-Frank
The round one should be near the service/breaker panels (to close up unused punch outs)…
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Was his name Lawrence? Our old house in Seattle was riddled with what the inspector called ‘amateur craftsmanship’. All kinds of weird stuff like this. Excited to see what you come up with for replacements.
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(I have that exact one top left. They’re awesome!)
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Reviving this older thread beacause I just thought of another practical application: I have several softbound cookbooks I’d like to convert to spiral bound. I could take them to Kinko’s and have them shave off the spine and punch the specially spaced holes, but once I have a laser onsite I should be able to do this myself. The plastic spirals are pretty cheap. Fun!
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Now that is an interesting point. I have a plastic comb binder that I just love. Making a jig and getting the hole punching dialed in on paper would be interesting.
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I bet you could also use the Glowforge as the world’s most expensive pencil sharpener.
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I wonder how many sheets you could do cleanly in one shot. (Also probably need some kind of fixture to hold them down.)
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You could also label your carpenter pencils.
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Here’s another practical idea I just thought of. We just returned from a party where I brought a tray of 3 dozen deviled quail eggs. I have special plates with oval indentations for regular (chicken) deviled eggs, but nobody makes those to hold eggs that are only 3/4" long. If I had a laser I could engrave little oval grooves in some acrylic, to match my eggs. And when 3D engraving is working, I could even slope the sides of the engrave to match the egg curvature.
I ended up scattering the tiny eggs on a bed of leaf lettuce. Folks loved them!
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Wow, this is neat, but upon first glance at this I thought it was a new 3D engrave file picture!