The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • Brick Wall in Z-Scale

    A LightBurn forum discussion about problems making Z-scale (1:220) bricks led me to trying a few ideas on the way to figuring out what was going wrong.

    Each brick is about 1.0×0.5 mm, so an entire wall doesn’t cover much territory:

    Z-scale bricks - assortment
    Z-scale bricks – assortment

    Yes, those are millimeters along the scale.

    The kerf on my 60 W CO₂ laser seems slightly wider than the “mortar” lines should be, so I made a layout with the vertical lines slightly inset from the horizontal ones:

    Z Scale Brick Wall - LB layout
    Z Scale Brick Wall – LB layout

    That let the kerf complete the lines without burning into the adjacent bricks:

    Z Scale Brick Wall - laser lines
    Z Scale Brick Wall – laser lines

    The cuts are obviously too wide (and deep!), but just for fun I colored the chipboard with red marker and rubbed a pinch of flour into the lines:

    Z Scale Brick Wall - color and flour
    Z Scale Brick Wall – color and flour

    Which looks chunky, but not terrible, for what it is. Maybe concrete blocks would look better?

    The next attempt started with a raster bitmap scaled at 254 dpi = 10 pix/mm, so that single-pixel “mortar” lines between 10×5 pixel bricks would be 0.1 mm wide:

    Raster Z-Scale Bricks
    Raster Z-Scale Bricks

    Scanning the image at 100 mm/s makes each pixel 1 ms “wide” and, because the power supply risetime is on the order of 1 ms, the laser won’t quite reach the 10% power level across the vertical lines:

    Raster Z-Scale Bricks - LB layer settings
    Raster Z-Scale Bricks – LB layer settings

    The raster lines come out lighter and (IMO) better looking:

    Z Scale Brick Wall - raster lines
    Z Scale Brick Wall – raster lines

    The horizontal lines are darker because the beam remains on at 10% across their full length, but the overall result seems much closer to the desired result.

    The original poster will use a diode laser and, combining all the ideas we came up with, now has a path toward making good, albeit invisibly small, bricks.

    His modeling (and coloring!) hand is strong!