Weekly Highlights for the week of Dec 25, 2016

[Jules]

Be sure to check out last week’s Highlights Reel as well:

Weekly Highlights 18-DEC-16

Highlights from Staff

---

Check out this glass ornament action:

Christmas Ornament

I’ve been dying to do stained glass work with the Glowforge. I have all sorts of different ideas for techniques combining wood and glass, but the very second thing had to be to prove that I could solder the wood with the glass without the wood burning up. (The very first thing was experimenting with cutting and engraving glass. Before you ask – none of the glass in this post was cut with the glowforge, but I do have another technique to try so I haven’t written it off just yet.) I put together …

Highlights from Beta & Pre-Release Users

---

Beer Bottle Bangles

Some family retro ornaments

I was preparing to go visit my aunt and uncle in Canada with my mother and wanted to make a more personal gift for them. My mothers side of the family has a long history of ginger ale as the family owned a company that made it for a couple of generations [image] so I chose that as my theme. First I found a picture on the web for the old bottles. [image] Then I pulled it into illustrator and worked out a vector version of it using the image as reference. [image] I then drew a bottle shap…

Cheese Please

Small bamboo cutting boards: engraved with cheese varieties

I went to the local outlet mall to the Kitchen Connection that has all the stuff for cooking. Lots of different materials to work with. I found these small bamboo cutting boards that would be perfect for serving cheese on. I bought five rectangular ones 5 1/2" x 4" and five round ones 5" in diameter. I looked up what are the most popular cheeses in America to serve and then thought about what other people around here serve for cheese. I personally would have one board reserved for different vari…

Magnetic Vent Hose Coupler

Prototype Quick Disconnect Magnetic Vent Hose Coupler

I really was caught unprepared to physically receive a Glowforge. I was ready in terms of design ideas, workflow and materials but other than putting the exhaust hose out a window, I didn’t really picture what I was going to do. Luckily the few weeks before I had transformed the basement office into a work room and had picked up the table and gave a few thoughts to the window situation. I procured a piece of Celotex from a parishioner and used a 28 oz. tomato can to pierce the two layers of Cel…

Veneer Inlay: Compass Rose (Work in Progress)

Proofgrade veneer compass rose inlay: from design to finished piece

This topic will be a work in progress. I did the design in Inkscape and did a test cut of cat food box chipboard. This is definitely a parametric modeling job in the long run to get exact dimensions of the darts, but Inkscape cloning did pretty well Hardest part is assembly. I ended up putting some spray adhesive on to keep the pieces from shifting from my fat and sticky fingers. A needle or some type of pick would work well to shift the pieces, I used a pen. ProofGrade Veneer comes with an adh…

Ornamental Inlay Photo Frame

Mixed Materials Photo Ornament: Inlay demonstration

Started messing around with the ornaments @smcgathyfay posted from Rowmark. Did some with walnut and wasn’t too happy with the design. Kept playing around and ended up with these. Here is a walnut in walnut inlay. I cut them with different grain directions for contrast to demo. Normally wouldn’t do that because of differential shrinkage. I simply did an offset of .0075 inches in Inkscape to do the center. [image] Then I decided it would make a nice photo inset with an acrylic front and maple…

Skateboard Repair - Nailed it!

The tailbone is connected to the skateboard

My daughters found my old skateboard and were playing around with it the other day. I noticed that the plate that protects the back of it for breaking was worn through. [image] I decided this was an excellent chance to try 1/4" acetal. I scanned in the existing part and traced the outline in Illustrator and placed 3 1/8" holes in the same locations as the old one. I was able to cut through the 1/4" acetal with no issues, it worked great. [image]It was a bit of a tight fit for the screws, …

New Pre-Releaser…Congratulations @karaelena! (lots of goodies in this one)

Pre-Release | From box to cut

A couple days ago I was contacted by @Rita about getting a pre-release unit. [image] I gladly accepted. [image] The package arrived friday evening. About 1 hour before our family xmas party- I was able to do this. [image] [image] So. From box to cut was 22 mins. No calibration. No adjustments. Nothing. Also the outside temp when I got the unit was 38F. So no warm up time. Add to network (which is dead simple) import a file and off to the races. Super impressive. Seriously. Here a coup…

Working with Fabrics

Testing out cutting and etching fabrics: denim and light cotton

Continuing the discussion from Fabric etching!: Christmas day always gets me in a project mood, whether because I got a new tool or just have the time to devote to something creative (besides cooking, that’s a given.) I have been wanting to test fabric so @bwente, @jamesdhatch and @mspricethelibrarian’s interest coincided with my own plans. First a test pattern in Inkscape. Making the 1/2 squares different colors allows me to choose 10 different dots per inch resolutions available in the cus…

Playing with Rasters

Playing with rastering

I’ve been playing around with some raster engraving. I still haven’t gotten a good test for the 3d engraving, but did work up a fun project for some detailed 2d engraving. It took some time, but the results were pretty good. I had seen some inspiring side views of ships and planes that had been cut out of wood and knew I wanted to try to make something similar. The other day I had a great conversation with a friend about various bombers from WW2 and decided to dig around for a nice image to …

Highlights from Forum Members

---

3D Printed Light Up Holiday Trees Construction

3D Printed Light-Up Holiday Trees

Here’s a video about some tchotchkes I made this year. Between various prototypes and the 25 I gave away, I had a veritable Santa’s Workshop production line in my basement for several weekends. I’m looking forward to having the use of a laser cutter for next year’s project. [Holiday Tree 2016 Build]

Depth Mapping Tests

Depth map tests

I finally had some time to start playing around with creating depth maps for the purpose of 3d engraving. I started with some of the sample 3d models i have in Cinema 4D. [image] Then it was just a matter of getting the camera setup right so that the focus area was just slightly larger then the 3d object. This will hopefully give me as much detail as possible in the final depth map. [image] Here is a few of the models that i rendered out. The detail looks pretty good but i can wait to see …

Vector Magic Auto-Trace Software

Vector Magic tracing program

I’ve done quite a bit of hobby graphic work and thought I’d share one of my favorite little programs called Vector Magic. If you aren’t familiar with working with vectors/graphic programs, it’s a good time to learn before getting your Glowforge! This program is a little gem and maybe someone can find it useful Vector Magic is available for online conversion or you can download the program. I use both Corel and Adobe and Vector Magic typically does a better job with tracing and…

Easy Wood Inlay Technique

Wood Inlay Using Timber Mate Wood Filler

I’ve been looking at inlay ideas, using metal powders with epoxy, etc. and I ran across this youtube video which shows filling engraved areas with Timber Mate wood filler. This looks very simple & easy compared to mixing epoxy. [Woodworking Inlay Made Easy]

Laser Foil Instructions

Using laser foil

Interesting post about using laser foil and acrylic to make name badges. Good step by step walkthrough.

Wooly Boogers

Laser cut 100% wool

@woolyrainbows asked how the laser would cut 100% hand dyed wool. https://community.glowforge.com/t/materials/3705?u=smcgathyfay She sent me some samples and it cuts like butter…lol. Smells a bit like burnt hair but not bad…:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: [image] Vector etched as well as raster etched. [image] Edges seal pretty well too without freying [image] [image] Setting are for my 35wt. Universal laser. Not sure how they would translate to the Glowforge. Vector cut 100% power 50%…

Tips for Vector Design for the Glowforge

Some Tips on Vector Designing for the Glowforge

While @marmak3261 was getting to know MakForge, he ran across a few design related tips and tricks that he thought would be a good idea to document for everyone, and since he needed another set of hands, I volunteered to assist with the write-up. I’m going to leave it in PDF format attached below…I think it will be easier for you guys to read if I don’t have to fight the forum formatting, so just download it if you are interested. It was a highly amusing journey…I’m going to post a couple of t…

Celtic Knot Design in CorelDraw

Celtic Knot Design Redone in CorelDraw

Following up on the work of @Jules and @marmak3261, we thought it would be helpful for those of you using CorelDraw to see how the design they worked with in Some Tips on Vector Designing for the Glowforge could be created in CorelDraw. I started with a blank document and created my own version of the design trying to stay true to the intent of the original design. Here’s what I ended up with: [image] You can follow along to see how I created it in this PDF file. @smcgathyfay - feel free to …

Celtic Knot Design in Affinity Designer

Celtic knot design redone in Affinity Designer

This is what I came up with in Affinity Designer to replicate the design that @Jules did with @marmak3261 with Illustrator and Inkscape in this thread, and @smcgathyfay and @johnwills did with Corel here <a class=“attachment”. href="//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/glowforge/original/2X/9/9e5317fa19540c418674d868d18dcad8815fd8e6.pdf">Celtic Knot in Affinity Designer.pdf (1.0 MB) Edit: forgot the SVG file creation step. File|Export, choose SVG, adjust options if …

[markevans36301]

No links, later?

[marmak3261]

Not a wiki as I can tell from this. You need to enable it as original poster I believe.

[Jules]

Yes, we’ll add the links over the next week for this one. The one that needs shifting is last weeks.

(And mom is feeding me again, so I got interrupted…I’ll wikify this one in a sec if I can.)

[Kusmeroglu]

Made it to the highlight reel

[Jules]

You’d have made it sooner, but my stupid cable got cut! Chuckle!

[Tex99]

Large Hightlights Reel. Hopefully getting longer as more Forges are released…

[Jules]

There was a lot more activity this week than I expected…you guys were smokin’ this week! (Doesn’t anybody believe in vacations?)