Skip to main content

I MADE A LASER ENGRAVING & ALSO A 3-D PRINT

So my place of work has a Makerspace now, which means I get to make stuff at work, which is pretty cool. To get ready for Con, I thought I'd make some stuff to add to my steampunk costume.

The watch is a pattern I downloaded from Thingiverse. The hands didn't come out, but it still looks cool. The hardest part was scraping out the "raft" - the temporary support part - out of everything. I found I'm not good at scraping the inside of a circle with a utility knife without getting my fingers cut, but luckily I didn't lose any.

The cameo was based on a project I saw on Instructables, but unfortunately it wasn't complete, because they were waiting on a Kickstarter or something which never happened. So, I just found a clip art of a Victorian-looking cameo and imported it into CorelDraw, which is what we use with our laser engraver (you can create the designs in other programs and import it as a JPG or PDF into Corel, but I needed the practice).

Corel is not the most intuitive drawing program in the world, so it would've been ideal to take a class first, but I fiddled with it based on my knowledge of other drawing programs, from Illustrator to good old ClarisWorks. The tricky part is making red outlines to indicate everything you want to cut though, but only those parts (black lines mean engraving).

My first attempt was too small, and just left a pile of dust. Finally, though, I got a size and pattern that would work. It's really neat to see the laser cut through the felt super-fast without somehow burning it up.

So, if you like to make stuff and are bad like me at cutting a straight line, give the laser engraver a try. 3-D prints tend to look to unfinished to me, maybe the watch needs a patina or something to make it look old.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MY BUBBLE

This is real heavy metal, by the way . So, this guy whose name I swear I'd never heard but appeared to have gone to my high school tried to friend me on Facebook. His main interests were the band Stryper and Republicanism, so I didn't add him. I mean, really, Stryper ? I thought teens in the 80s only listened to them because they liked metal and their parents forbade any other band as a direct path to the worship of Satan. When you leave home, you throw away their records and listen to real metal. But then I read this article that said we are all getting trapped in a bubble of like-minded people who parrot our ideas back to us, due to social networks and rss feeds and apps only giving us the people/opinions/stories we want to hear. And I thought--maybe I was wrong. Or maybe I'm OK, because I do have a lot of weird interests that make it pretty hard to find people who are on the same page with everything. I have social network connections with people around roleplaying game

TOP TEN LIPSYNCH FOR YOUR LIFE SONGS FOR A DRAG KING EQUIVALENT OF RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE

 The Advocate has suggested that the greatest (i.e. only good) reality show ever, Rupaul's Drag Race , have a drag king contestant.  That's fine, but it would be much more entertaining to have a whole drag king competition. One of the best parts of Drag Race is seeing all the different types of queens compete: beauty queens, funny queens, conceptual queens, androgynous queens, scary queens, singing and dancing queens.  I want to see punk kings, gangsta rap kings, cock-rocking metal kings, panty-dropping R & B kings, country kings, baggy-pants burlesque comic kings, and of course, Elvis. I picked out some songs that make me think of different aspects of masculinity:  swaggering men, heartbroken men, lustful men, romantic men, philosophical men, and suicidally depressed men (interesting fact: I can think of dozens of songs by men about suicide, but only one female one: "Gloomy Sunday". What's up with that?) "That's Life" - Frank Sinatra

HOME ENTERTAINMENT UPDATE: THE EMBIGGENING

  Chromecast CD storage Antenna Blu-ray player Apple TV Receiver Record player VHS Tape player So, I decided to spend my tax refund on home entertainment this year, as TV keeps getting better, whereas movies... not so much. My computer is old, but it still works, and replacing a computer seems less urgent when you have mobile devices. It feels like a long time ago when RAM and processor power seemed so important in order to use the latest bloated software, but now with so many webapps and sites designed for mobile, as long as your Internet is fast enough, you're OK. Lifehacker says to spend money where you spend most of your time, and I now use my tablet more than my desktop. Also, with all the streams I have access to, there was one chink in my entertainment system -- my TV was not actually big enough to appreciate high definition. Well, it seemed like a good deal in 2007, at $200 more than my new one which is almost twice as big. The main thing stopping me