Punched Cards: Layered Apollo Eagle

What with punching the Apollo 11 CSM source code into the cards, converting the mission’s eagle into a layered shape made some sense.

The original Apollo 11 mission patch:

After considerable faffing, a few of the fifteen layers look like this in GIMP:

Each layer is a connected white region defining the cut perimeter, which will expose some part of the layer(s) below it in the stack. The small squares in the corners provide a bounding box to make all the layers snap to the same location.

Then:

• Select each layer’s shape + corner boxes with GIMP’s Color Select tool
• Convert the selection to a path
• Export paths as SVG files (all fifteen of them!)
• Import SVGs into LightBurn & arrange neatly
• Put outlines on a cut layer, corner squares on a tool layer
• Burn each layer separately

Testing the concept with packing paper looked surprisingly good:

A few key layers on punched cards:

The changes for each of those iterations required tweaking the original layer images to eliminate obvious-in-retrospect problems, recreating the SVG files, and importing into LightBurn. This is a relentlessly manual process.

Then I ran a full-up test of all fifteen layers on cards punched with the Apollo source code.

Cutting the head layers from face-down cards made them sufficiently white, although it’d be nice to have a different beak color and darker eyes :

I must arrange the cards with text to put more holes in the wings, although too many will cause fragile feathers:

The white tail should be also done with face-down cards, more holes, and the three-way joint between the cards shifted under the tail layers to its left:

The feet and olive branch were a total faceplant, as successive layers did not register accurately enough to overlay the leaves:

Not to mention those ug-u-lee claws.

The wing layers need more rounding along their edges, perhaps with some thin cuts to emphasize the feathers.

On the whole, though, I think it turned out well.

Things to do:

• Registration holes / pins up to the top layer
• Remove speckles on all the layers
• Arrange cards for more hole density where needed
• Better glue application
• Different card colors?