Last Week’s Highlights
Can the Glowforge cut davey board?
News Flash: The CDC has issued an alert warning employers around the country of an impending outbreak of the GlowFlu. This disease can result in rapid loss of productivity, absenteeism, and a complete lack of concentration.
Currently there is no treatment for GlowFlu, although complete recovery can be effected after several days rest.
The Evolution of a Designer
July 7th, 2016, nearly a year ago now, and long before actually having a Glowforge in my laser pantry, I was working hard at learning exactly what a laser could do and how I might learn to design files to use with it. Our esteemed forum member, James Hatch (@jamesdhatch ), so very kindly offered to help me. At the time, I thought it would be really cool to try my hand at making a replacement wind catcher for some wind chimes that hang out on our deck. The original one had broken off and the chime…
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Some folks simply cannot plan ahead:Fabulous Photo Frames
Michael’s had craft frames on sale last week for $1 a pack (1-3 items, depending). My sister-in-law asked me to make a graduation present for a family friend, so I came up with this…
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Engraved at 1/335/240, approx 13 minutes, then stained, shellaced, and buffed with 0000 steel wool.
My wife liked it, so made this for her sister.
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I have a stack of these frames with various cutouts ready for the next last-minute request.
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Instrument tags for fundraisers
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Hubby and I have been producing the newsletter (they send us content and we make it look pretty in inDesign) on a volunteer basis for about 20 years, for the Fiddler organization founded by our friend Vesta Johnson. So I happen to have on hand a vector form of the org’s logo. I thought I’d surprise Vesta and the officers with some tags to put on their instrument cases. The prototype in 1/8" maple plywood took nearly 6 minutes, but when I made 6 more in one run the time per unit wen…
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Luscious Lithograph
Given all the folks engraving photos recently, thought maybe a old 1800s lithograph might engrave better since it is linear shaded.
I chose this one as it was high-res and nicely shaded
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Engraved it on 1/8" Baltic Birch:
Chose the medium and dark settings from Maple Ply, I may try a midpoint to see if I can get more contrast without baking the wood. Definitely does a pretty nice job, although the darkest areas get baked on the darker setting, while the lighter one has way more subtle…
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Clever Problem Solver
Hi all. I have just finished renovating my basement, and the Glowforge has been helping me finish off some of the last few tricky items.
For the renovation I used a number of salvaged items, including two salvaged wood and glass doors that were formerly used as sliding closet doors. (I don’t know who would tear out these doors, they would have to be crazy. But I guess I’m lucky there are crazy people out there.) I decided to install one door as a sliding bathroom door, and to hang the other as …
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One Stick to Rule Them All
I’ve found it interesting at times when I realize that there are things that are so simple when working in real world scale. One of those things is that you can space a bunch of lines out at 1/8" and print it out and it’s still 1/8" apart. This makes it dead simple to make a ruler or other measuring device. So, you can spend more time decorating them. Here were some we made out of tongue depressors at the Maker Faire to hand out.
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I wanted to make something bigger and more…
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Leather Journal Cover (Part 2)
So, I kept iterating on the leather journal I was making for my friend. I was able to grab a picture of one of her favorite artworks with my phone, then used that to etch it into the leather.
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Then I got some leather dye to get it into some other shade than nude vegtan color [image]
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It looked pretty decent on…
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A Challenging Case
When I first got some of the oiled leather to work with I wanted to do some smaller testing with it before doing anything large. The first thing I did was get some small holes cut out of it so I’d know what power setting to use. I started with the heavy vegtan settings from the proofgrade library and just kept adjusting speed/power until I was getting clean cuts. My keys are always worrying holes in my pocket, so after dialing in my settings I made a little key cover.
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it wraps the …
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Mega City One
Supplies : 1/4" Proograde Acylic, 1/8" Walnut Hardwood & Cherry Ply
Op Time: 32 mins for the small one and 1hr 15min for the large one. All done @ 675LPI.
Judge Dredd is well into my top 10 movie list.
This is mostly an example of the 'forge (specifically a PRU) doing 3D Engraving.
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Unfortunately, I don’t know where exactly where I got the STL as it was in my ‘movie props’ folder from about 3 years ago. But I passed it into Blender to get a depth map. Then into Photoshop to remove th…
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“Not So Happy With It” - 3D Engrave
After seeing @karaelena ’s Dredd engrave, figured I’d try to engrave a 3D depth map… For a test, didn’t want the variable of my own 3D model conversion to depth map, since I know how to produce depth maps from 3D models, but am trying to figure out the engrave itself.
Decided on this model
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On the advice of @karaelena I removed the black background, and cut it out, and used the outer selections (in thick black in this example I made to make it visible - it’s not really like that, but y…
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Publish or Perish Die
My brother is a political scientist who has spent the past 40 years in academia. He was recently named professor emeritus, so I made him this 25mm D6 die to give him a bit more time for golf and travel…
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Engraved at 1/200/240
I made another one and painted the engrave with acrylic paint, but I like this one better.
The faces are:
Accept
Reject
Minor Changes
Major Changes
Revise & Resubmit
Open Access!
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Mitral Valve Repair Silmulator https://community.glowforge.com/t/pre-release-mitral-valve-repair-simulator/8148?u=jules /uploads/db6859/optimized/3X/b/4/b4b5b9d641d53f7d7a91d492a02d212b7759b48c_1_666x500.jpg
737 House
My son had a geometry class assignment and he goes to my old high-school which is super high-tech (they have a huge maker space that would be just fine on most college campuses) and they are expected to integrate coding and making in almost all classes. So this geometry assignment was to make any crazy house you wanted (with some geometry constraints) and you got extra points for “making” it, and also for CAD designing in (the teacher is a big laser cutting person).
So most kids are using luon …
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Silhouette
Supplies : 1/8" Black & Frosted Acrylic and Walnut Hardwood
Op time : Black - 4mins 33sec , Frosted 3mins 6 secs & Walnut 3mins 44sec.
Yesterday I was poking around my Aperture library (Yup. Aperture) and I found an old image I took eons ago with an old Olympus E300.
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I opened in Photoshop and converted it to greyscale and used the curve tool to crush the details and make the edges more pronounced.
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Then imported it into Illustrator and vectored it and added a border.
[im…
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Gettin’ Grungy
I just wanted to whip up something to put on my sister’s birthday gift for this weekend (already made her an edge lit Happy Birthday sign). So I was leaning toward handmade flowers, and of course I wanted to use the Glowforge. I flirted with the idea of making them out of leather, but knowing my sister they would end up in the trash after opening the gift (she’s not into saving stuff; that’s fine). So I decided to use Grunge Paper from Ranger instead. It is made from recycled paper and has …
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How the GF saved my @$% today
We were headed out of town this morning to a graduation, and I had a number of engraves to finish before we left, and time was tight. Then I got an emergency work call and had to go into the office. I spent all night dialing in the best settings for what I was cutting, but wasnt going to make it home in time to get everything cut before we had to go.
I called my girlfriend to try to walk her through what I needed to do, but in the middle of the call realized I could just do it from my phone! I …
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Squirrel Chaser
Okay, not a real squirrel. Just the metaphorical kind. The kind that distracts you from something you intended to do but diverts you by running past. This forum (& not to mention your correspondent) is disproportionately populated by squirrel chasers.
Here’s tonight’s chase. I’ve been offline for almost two weeks traveling for work (with a side trip to WV to smoke 150lbs of brisket and baby backs for about 80 of my motorcycle compatriots riding a scavenger hunt type rally last weekend). Before…
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Waterfall Lamp
I’ve been wanting to make a lamp for a while, so I decided to go whole hog and make a multi material waterfall lamp.
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The base was made with pg maple and the design was altered from a file I made to make the vent cover a while back. I made the grooves for the front plate using the darkest engrave feature. However, they ended up being too shallow, so I then sanded the grooves to make them deeper.
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I’m going to have to figure out something to do with all these swirls!
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How to Make A Wooden Yo-Yo
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Grampadrew Sign
I’ve been working on a sign for grampadrew, a friend and local musician. Here are two prototypes. Earlier, I posted an engraving of an image I grabbed off his website .
The first image is made with Proofgrade Maple Hardwood and Clear Acrylic. (Eventually, I’ll make a large sign with clear acrylic and color changing LEDs in the background.)
The second image is made with Proofgrade Maple Hardwood and Walnut Hardwood.
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…skulls make everything cooler.
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Fisics Funnies
First you need to know I’m something of a geek. The pencil-neck nerdy kind. Well maybe not pencil-neck but I do appreciate geek humor.
Whilst retrieving my daughter from the giant cash sucking machine called University last month I saw the Hugs Bison cartoon on the Physics Department’s lobby welcoming screen. First time I’ve seen it (although @takitus pointed out that it’s been wandering the Internet for awhile) - I’m not normally surrounded by folks where Higs, Bison or Bosons ever come up in …
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Tonights Little Victory Over Clutter
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Projects don’t have to be complex to be a win.
Ever since my 7" tablet died my new 10" has not had a good home as every mount I have it too small. Tonight I make a mount from 3… birch, some shock cord, and a couple of self stick coat hangers.
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Stamp"Unless"
Thanks to the awesome twosome @karaelena , I’ve made my first stamp on the Glowforge. Thanks so much for the artwork, AI help, and settings advice!!
Glowforge + @karaelena = Awesome!!
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Quilt Block Key Holder
This one uses half inch thick foam core and fabric to create a faux quilt effect.
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And during the construction phase:
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Last Minute Nurses Gift
Last night one of our senior nurses had a really rough shift, and since she is on tonight (and she follows my maker projects closely), I decided maybe a surprise laser gift would be nice for tonight. I had jokingly made a nurses cap for her out of a medication cup last night with a little red-cross on it, and she said, oh wouldn’t it be cool to laser cut one for me… (trust me it was funny at 4am…)
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So a quick internet search of nurses caps, trace in AI. I was going to go to Michaels pr…
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SKOGSTA
https://community.glowforge.com/t/pre-release-skogsta/8235?u=jules /uploads/db6859/optimized/3X/b/e/be3d451ba517a3dec141c5007b8ddf59574e8365_1_669x499.JPG
