Weekly Highlights for the Week Ending January 28th, 2017

[Jules]

Previous Week’s Goodies:
Weekly Highlights for the Week of January 15, 2017

Pearls of Wisdom from the Staff:

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Proofgrade Leather Specs

Pre-Release | Leather Bracelet

That looks amazing! What a brilliant design! The current version of the Proofgrade leather is very light tan, unfinished, vegetable tanned kip leather. Extremely high quality. If you let it wear naturally it will darken to a mid-tan. You can oil it with all sorts of products, stain it, rub it with wax, use water to mold it… all sorts of cool stuff. It’s really easy and fun to work with!

Auto-Detection of Multiple Materials?

Proofgrade veneer compass rose inlay: from design to finished piece

You can print on two different materials if you assign speed and power settings manually. It will only autodetect one material at a time for now.

Yessss! We got a Hopper item!

We built a quick little hopper item

While we have a lot of work in the hopper to help with positioning, we did make one invisible but handy change now. If you upload an artboard or SVG canvas that is the magic dimensions 12x20, the UI will override its automatic placement of the contents and pin the top-left corner of the artboard to the top-left corner of the screen. This little workaround makes it easier to use jigs, if you so desire. I haven’t tried it myself, but something tells me @takitus will give it a whirl soon. …

Pre-Release and Beta Hijinks:

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Caddy Shack

Bar Glass Caddy

I like to drink hot tea in a glass but I don’t have one of those cool Russian tea cup holders. [image] So I made a caddy to fit around the hot glass. [image] I’ve been tinkering around with the most efficient way to design in Inkscape. I know it would help to move to some 3D program, but I can do it fairly quickly now. This particular issue was to see how to make slots efficiently in a shape so that the pieces go together with friction fit. Tab box makers figure this all out for you, but i…

Magic Energy - We Could All Use Some

Beta Project: Magic: the Gathering Energy Tokens

I wanted to try a multi-material inset project, and I think I saw some energy tokens here, but I decided that I would give it a shot. I made 10 tokens and a little case to hold them in for travel. [image] Tokens are engraved on both sides (just flipped the token over after the first engrave/cut being careful not to move the larger piece of maple.) Edit… That’s not quite true. The bolt isn’t a symmetrical entity, so I had to create a mirror image of the engrave in the same location. I just ma…

DIY Downdraft Table

My Downdraft table

I do a lot of work in my office and sometimes that leaves quite a mess. I’ve been eyeing downdraft tables for sanding for a long time. Since I don’t have a ton of space and my desk has a edge on the back I decided was the day to make one fit for my space. The Glowforge made cutting the body panels and the holes in the top simple. I put my business logo on the front for fun. [image]

Battlestar Galactica Viper Gun

Colonial Vipers full forward thrust

Always a sucker for retro stuff I had set my mind on building a 3D model of the old Battlestar Galactica Vipers. I had one of my old toys as a reference. [image] Deciding to keep it simple, I used the shapes as a guideline for building my first model. [image] I’d cut the slots to hold the wings on too deep and the hit the front engine piece so I went back and adjusted a bit. That got me to a good fit. I also designed two more plates to give the engine area more volume. [image] Now that…

Pitch Car Play

Pitch Car expansions!

One of my favorite board games is a dexterity game called Pitch Car. You flick little wooden disks around a modular track made of wood. Today I made a ramp for my race track. Years ago someone put up dimensions of the connectors and some examples. This is the one I picked to try. Not my work but from Google to play ready was about 15 min including glue time. It amazes me how fast things can come together sometimes. [image][image]

Beeeeeee Good

Pre-Release | Little Test Engrave for Depth

I did a little grayscale test engrave the other night. It was a single pass, but it’s a good example of the kind of relief you can get out of the GF. Doing a second pass should be close to multiplying the depth by 2. Edit: this was done on proofgrade maple ply at default dark settings. You quite possibly might be able to do a very light pass at the end to clean some of the charring off. I might be able to do a test on that in the next few days. [image] [image] No bananas, but library card f…

Making her Glowforge Debut…

Pre-Release | A Novice Tries Engraving

I received a pre-release unit about 2.5 weeks ago. Since then, I’ve given myself a crash course in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (a complete novice in both). Seeing awesome engraves in the forum, I decided to try engraving too. After learning how to tweak settings in both Illustrator and Photoshop, I was able to print the item below. It is a picture of a good friend, a local musician. [image] The engrave is printed on Proofgrade maple plywood. I believe the print took about 1 hour. I …

LeeLoo Dallas Multipass

Multi Pass

One of the advantages to making props as a living is sometimes I get to make one for myself and call it ‘practice’ [image]

Just Whistle

Acrylic and MDF Siren Whistle

Not sure what they are going to do the maple skinned MDF. The beta Proofgrade I got had a slight warp, but it worked out just fine. I was browsing @m_raynsford’s excellent blog for inspiration and I came across his siren whistle build of an Instructable he’d found. In chasing down the Instructable, I had a few ideas as to how it would work best with the Glowforge, Proofgrade materials, and the other aspects of the design. I learned a few things in the process and best of all didn’t have to get…

Forum Member Frolics:

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Making Your Own 3D Scanner

Thinking out of the bottle!

Most of my life I’ve found that a series of odd coincidences have been turning points for me, and as another one has started over the last 24 hours, I’ll just go with it. In the search for a simple, low cost, low effort, method of producing a depth map, about ten years ago I started a thread on ‘cnczone’ entitled “3D for Crazies”. If you go looking for it, you’ll spot the same avatar, so you’ll know your in the right place. There were 170 posts, so it’s quite a read, and it’s pretty light heart…

More Glowforge on “Tested”

More Glowforge on Tested: LED Star Map

Simone Giertz laser cuts her secret santa gift… https://youtu.be/DzQJ-h2UJDc

Make Magazine

Make Magazine review of Glowforge

http://makezine.com/2017/01/25/glowforge-almost-worth-wait/ I’m still reading, but I wanted to share.

Sweet Deal

Not right now Honey... I like to Make Stuff

[image] I missed the livestream but it was posted on I Like to Make Stuff Instagram. Made on a lathe and Glowforge lettering.

SquiggleDraw

Generative SVGs for engraving

Hey all! One of the things I do in my spare time is make lots of generative/algorithmic art with code, using tools like Processing, openFrameworks, etc. I recently released the code for an app that will load a photo and create a sort-of halftone image using sine waves. That is, the brightness/darkness of the image will increase or decrease the amplitude of a sine wave as it goes across the image. It’s easier to see the example below. The output of the app is a SVG file. I originally created t…

[cmreeder]

Thanks for collecting this together. I’ve fallen behind a bit the last week or two and the highlights reel is a fabulous resource.