Laser Cutting - Tumblr Posts

I did it. I just ordered a laser cutter.

There’s this company called Glowforge that’s made a new consumer-level laser cutter, and after a year or so of hearing whispers about it they have now released it for pre-order. 

The specs are totally reasonable. 40 Watt CO2 laser, 12x20 inch cutting bed. They’re doing a lot of fancy stuff with a cloud-based driver, like optically locating your material and registering your artwork onto it. A lot of that stuff is pretty darn cool, but I probably won’t use much of that functionality. In the end it probably won’t quite negate my need to go in and rent time on the big cutters at the laser store, but I’ll be able to produce lot of my designs quickly and easily without paying someone else. And it’ll make prototyping super easy.

The retail price they’ve set for the cutter is $4000, but for the rest of their pre-order period they’re offering it at HALF OFF. Which is freaking awesome. If you too want a laser cutter of your very own, go check them out before the end of the week!

But wait there’s more! If you use my referral link: http://glowforge.com/referred/?kid=6N3AV you’ll get an extra $100 off the discounted price, and I’ll also get $100 back! If you use my link to buy a cutter I’ll send you a pile of sweet laser-cuttable designs that I’ve made that you can cut for yourself!

Suggest some mask ideas!

Some context: The place I go to rent time on the laser cutter recently switched how they charge. They used to charge per minute of cutting time, which was convenient because I could pop over when someone bought something off Etsy, cut it out quickly, pay for the 3 minutes of cutting time, and be out the door within 10 minutes.

But they switched to charging according to time that you’re on the machine. Which would be fine, since I’m pretty practiced and efficient, except that the minimum time they’re charging for is $50 per half hour on the cutter.

So in order to not bleed money, any time I’m there cutting something for an order I need to pad out the half hour with cutting extra copies of something else. So far I’ve been cutting blanks of the small mask designs I’ve had for a while.

But this is also a fine opportunity to make some new more small- to medium-sized designs! Recently my most popular design has been this jackal mask. I should make some more designs like that.

So what sorts of animals would people be excited to see in fancy leather mask form? Let me know!!!!?

Troubles with lasers

The place I've been renting laser cutting time for the last few years seems to be heading in the direction of out of business. A few months ago they stopped making custom orders for people, but were still open for renting time on the machines. Now they've stopped offering laser services entirely.

I used to run this shop for a year and a half, until the spring of 2013. It had always been a struggle, mostly because of the poor choices of the owner. Now it seems he's finally done it in. I'm sad about the community losing this resource, but I'm not surprised or sorry for the owner. Who knows, maybe he'll convince more investors into keeping it afloat for a while longer, but I'm not sure what his expectation is for making any money going forward. Their website seems to claim they're planning on designing and selling a laser cutter, but I'm highly skeptical.

Anyway, I'm getting trained on a cutter at an artist-focused maker space tomorrow. It's less conveniently located to my current apartment, but I expect it'll save me money anyway. And it'll be interesting to have a chance to break into that group of artists.

LOOK UPON MY LASERS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR.

So last Thursday I got a call in the middle of the day from the vendor coordinator at Arisia. I’d been wait-listed back in the fall, I may have mentioned previously. They’d had someone cancel, though, and would I like to take the table on a week’s notice?

So that’s been my week basically. I used up the leather I’d had on hand very quickly, though I was able to squeeze way more masks than I’d expected out of my scrap pile. Today a fresh hide of leather finally arrived, and this pile is what I’ve cut out of it so far.

Half a day on the laser cutter. If I didn’t have this thing, there’s no way I would be able to get this sort of volume made in time. Sometimes that just hits me hard. Next is staining and forming them up, so we’ll see how quick I can get that done.

Testing out making leather masks sized to fit fursuit heads, and I think it worked pretty well! I think I'll have a small stack of them at my table at Anthro New England!

I could do any of my small masks like this, so if you’re going and would like a specific design/color, let me know and I can make one for you. Otherwise I’ll just have a mix of colors and styles to choose from.

Since I expect there's a lot of variation in fursuit face shapes and sizes, I think the way it'll work is to bring them dyed+sealed, but not formed, and the process will involve meeting with people in the evening to saran wrap their heads and form the leather, then they bring it back to their rooms and let it dry for a few hours.

Here's a bunch of progress shots showing the development of this wolf skull mask. (Final images here.)

I started with a simple muzzle shape that I designed in Rhino, then drew the skull pattern to fit on it. Once I was happy with it I scanned that in and traced with vectors, and made some slight adjustments to the base muzzle shape, so I could then go and laser-cut the whole thing again. I dyed the base and painted the skull's cracks in with black dye, then sewed the base together and tacked the skull onto it to sculpt it.

Once everything was dry and set in its final shape, I painted the surface of the skull with a couple coats of white acrylic. Gave the whole thing a clear coat to seal it, and sewed the pieces together. The last line of stitches is hidden at the base of the teeth, so it follows a funky wavy path, which you can see on the interior shot. Last steps were putting the snaps on so it could attach to the straps.

I do love typography and design So I did these examples of work. I was trying to use my laser cut designs that I did in illustrator and color it digitally.

 I also tried to design something with text as an experiment, I first tried to make a design in my sketchbook but in illustrator I changed it as shown in the pictures. 

Attended the Laser Cutting workshop today, and had a lot of fun!! As much as I enjoy working with my hands, I have to admit I feel very at ease working behind a computer screen. We made a little template snail in Adobe Illustrator, and then cut it out with the laser cutter.