New Experiences and Learning from Old Mistakes

Some things that I also did from last week was laser cutting the Name Plate. The images of the final Name Plate and it being laser-cut can be seen below. This was my first ever project on a laser cutter and it taught me how to design things and Adobe Illustrator and export them for laser cutting. In the future, I plan to laser cut another stand for the Name Plate. I am also planning on making a 3D model of the school that I am attending. Details of how I am planning to make the model can be seen on the Project Proposal page on my website. Some information about my project is I plan to primarily use cardboard as my base material and I might 3D print some miniature desks and chairs. The laser cutter that I used is from the glowforge series and it is pretty easy to use, a picture of it can be seen below.

From my experience with 3D printing, using the Lulzbot was quite easy because of their auto-leveling. They also were able to produce higher quality parts than the 3D printer that I have at my house. However, I did still have some problems with the Lulzbot. One repeated problem was the amount of stringing and the first layer being skipped in the print. Another problem was that my prints were coming out a little too good, so I had to start 3D modeling with bigger tolerances, so that way it would be a little loose. Using the laser cutter was an entirely different experience for me because I learned that there are multiple ways to design models for laser cutting. For example, one way is to just draw the design in a 2D plane. Another way would be to make a 3D model, then take the faces of the model, put it on a 2D plane, then add some connection points. There is also software that can automatically slice 3D models into SVG files that are ready to cut.