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.

Tag: Art-ish

They might be Art

Danger Zone Earrings: More SCP Warning Labels

More tinkering produced a full set of SCP warning labels in vector format suitable for laser cutting:

SCP warning signs – LB layout

The faint blue corresponds to the LightBurn tool layer, because you’ll want to assign your own cutting parameters.

The circumscribing circle provides a convenient way to snap the pattern into something else, because the symbols in the middle are not necessarily centered around their geometric midpoint.

Suiting action to drawings:

SCP Earrings – black on yellow – cutting

The acrylic fire shows they’re called Danger Zone earrings for well and good reason!

Anyhow, weeding the black vinyl produces crisp results:

SCP Earrings – black on yellow – overview

The fallout shelter symbol (top right) should have a circle around it, but that’s in the nature of fine tuning. It’s also not part of the SCP canon, but it kinda goes along with the radiation warning sign.

They’re cut from transparent amber non-edge-lit acrylic with black vinyl PSA patterns:

SCP Earrings – black on yellow – detail

Still not enough to get me to go full-frontal Mr Clean.

The LightBurn SVG layout as a GitHub Gist:

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view raw SCP Warning Labels – LB vector.svg hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I have no explanation for the different stroke widths, other than that SVG files seem to maintain a memory of every transformation applied to any object. LightBurn doesn’t use the stroke widths, so it should work out just fine.

2023-06-12
Danger Zone Earrings: GITD and PSA Vinyl FTW
With the geometry set up, cutting earrings with surface coatings is just a matter of tweaking a few settings:

Danger Zone Earrings – GITD and PSA vinyl – white light

From left to right:
- Green PSA vinyl on black acrylic
- Black PSA vinyl on edge-lit acrylic
- GITD tape stuck on black acrylic
UV lights up the edge-lit samples:

Danger Zone Earrings – GITD and PSA vinyl – UV light

And UV powers up GITD tape something fierce:

Danger Zone Earrings – GITD radiation

Cutting the central pattern out of the GITD earring might make it look even better, but I like the subtle presentation.

If it’s flash you want, then retroreflective tape is your fashion friend:

Danger Zone Earrings – retroreflective

The bolder kiss-cut lines in the middle earring might suffice, but the cutouts on the right definitely look more distinctive. Perhaps the kiss-cut perimeter line would set the pattern off a little better.

Assuming PSA vinyl sticks to itself and GITD tape well enough to survive normal handling, that would make multicolor earrings an option:

Danger Zone Earrings – multilayer PSA vinyl

On the left: blue PSA vinyl on GITD tape. On the right: green PSA vinyl on red PSA vinyl on black acrylic. Peeling the PSA vinyl is tedious and I’m still not good enough to avoid small nicks in the underlying layer.

GITD FTW:

Danger Zone Earrings – multilayer vinyl GITD

Now, to work on more patterns …
2023-06-08
Danger Zone Earrings: MVP

Some geometry review and a bit of fiddling with LightBurn produced regularized patterns suitable for laser cuttery:

Danger Zone Earrings – radioactive – handful

A key trick: circumscribe the figure with a circle on a tool layer, then group the whole mess together, so that the center of the circle coincides with the desired center of the figure. In particular, the geometric center of an equilateral triangle is not at the center of its vertical extent:

Danger Zone Earrings – radioactive – LB layout

The dark blue layer engraves the surface, the red layer cuts through 3 mm acrylic, and the light blue layer is the tooling.

I like the edge-lit ones, although the simplicity of laser-cut clear acrylic is hard to beat:

Danger Zone Earrings – radioactive – white light

Wearing them in a place flooded with UV radiation would set you apart:

Danger Zone Earrings – radioactive – GITD UV

The careful observer will note stress cracking in the two clear earrings in the middle row. Those came from the vintage paper-covered acrylic sheet and I used alcohol to clean off the not-quite-vaporized glue just to see if isopropyl alcohol would behave differently than denatured alcohol. Nope, the cracks appear instantly.

Peeling the paper and engraving the bare surface produced the clear-frosted earring in the upper right, with the radiation symbol cut out of the sheet. Engraving without surface protection tends to deposit vaporized acrylic dust everywhere, so it would require hand cleaning without the cutouts.

The cutouts get 0.1 mm inward offsets to slightly increase the wall thickness around that central circle.

One combination I didn’t try: engrave the triangle perimeter for emphasis and cut out the symbol for contrast with edge-lit acrylic.

Dropping other symbols into place should be straightforward, with the center of the circumcircle as the snap target.

The LightBurn SVG layout as a GitHub Gist:

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view raw Danger Zone Earring – radioactive – LB layout.svg hosted with ❤ by GitHub

2023-06-06
SCP Warning Label Earrings: Rattlecan Feasibility Test

Our Young Engineer provided different specs for earrings than I’d been using, which prompted a quick-n-dirty test to see how they might come out:

SCP Warning Labels – test 1

The images come from the SCP Wiki with tweakage for better contrast:

SCP warning signs – BW 3×3

Then I traced them into LightBurn vectors suitable for engraving, added hanging holes, and fit a perimeter cutout. This being a test, I took a number of shortcuts resulting in slightly off-center engravings and ignored a number of image botches (most notably in the Inconsistent Topology figure.

A quick painting fixture kept (most of) the rattlecan paint off the edges:

SCP Warning Labels – fixture clamping

The acrylic is old enough to have brown paper protective layers, rather than fancy plastic sheets. I peeled various combinations and shot various sides with purple:

SCP Warning Labels – purple coat

Remove some, flip others over, and hit ’em with yellow:

SCP Warning Labels – yellow coat

I expected purple markings over a yellow background to look best:

SCP Warning Labels – purple over yellow

But the inverse version seems more contrasty (ignore the off-center cutout):

SCP Warning Labels – yellow over purple

I think the purple-on-clear version would look better with edge-lit acrylic:

SCP Warning Labels – purple over clear

The 0.15 mm line spacing seems too coarse, but trying to get a perfectly flat engraved bottom seems futile.

A second coat of paint on the engraving would definitely boost the contrast.

If you were going to do this for real, you’d definitely recreate the images with vectors right from the start, using the original images as inspiration.

All in all, I like ’em, but there’s some improvement required before anybody else does!

2023-06-05
Earring Laser Fixture

Cutting or engraving patterns on earrings should go more smoothly with a fixture:

Earring fixture – demo install

That’s a serving suggestion, using the Biohazard test pieces, which also helped align the top and bottom layers while gluing:

Earring fixture – clamping

That used all my little clamps: obviously I need more!

The bottom layer (red) is MDF for strength and the top layer (orange) is chipboard because that’s all it needs:

Earring fixture – LB layout

The little tab along the top ensures alignment using the jump ring cutout. The central hole will let me cut through the earring, should that be necessary.

The two strips over on the left get glued on the bottom, spaced to align along one of the aluminum knife blade rails, as with the craft stick fixture. With that lined up, any two of the four targets will serve to align the template with the fixture using LightBurn’s Print-and-Cut tool, as with the craft stick template.

Now, to make some smoke!

The LightBurn SVG layout as a GitHub Gist:

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2023-06-01
Biohazard Earrings

More desk clearing revealed a sketch for another trinket:

Biohazard symbol

That’s built directly from the original specs to get the spacing and symmetries correct. The freebies I could find all suffered from various degrees of bad design & layout.

A chipboard coaster provided some reassurance:

Biohazard coaster

Shrunken down to 25 mm OD, the tips become vanishingly small:

Biohazard earring – vinyl sample

It’s the same laser-safe polyurethane vinyl as the SD card reader, this time applied to 3 mm black acrylic. The “gold” ring is just parked in place, as this one wasn’t presentation-quality.

Contrary to the usual transfer-tape method of applying PSA vinyl, I stuck the sheet to the acrylic before cutting, then weeded it directly off the acrylic:

Biohazard earring – vinyl weeding

Kiss-cutting the vinyl with dot mode ate into the acrylic, but the soon-to-be-weeded areas protected the surroundings and the result came out looking pretty good. To me, anyhow.

Flushed with success, I tried some almost certainly not laser safe glow-in-the-dark tape:

Biohazard earring – GITD weeding fail

The mess in the upper left is the tape’s double-sided adhesive intended to hold the glowy layer in place forever. Of course it weeded poorly!

Seen in its natural environment, however, weeding may not be necessary:

Biohazard earring – GITD tape glow

Engraving the rebated rim leaves quite a bit of debris & scorch marks around the perimeter. A mask layer atop the GITD tape seems like a Good Idea™.

The LightBurn SVG layout as a GitHub Gist:

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2023-05-29
Plant Markers: Craft Stick Edition

Inspired by a LightBurn forum post I ~~can no longer find~~ once again tracked down, I tried my hand at ~~popsicle~~ craft stick plant markers:

Plant Markers – craft stick tests

You’d have only one name on the end of each stick, with the uncut section jammed into the ground: these are test pieces to demonstrate capability.

Wood is better than acrylic because it checks all the eco-friendly attribute boxes. Admittedly, craft sticks don’t exactly grow on trees, but we seem to ignore such externalities in nominally eco-friendly products.

Bonus: a recurring revenue stream from the replacement market!

The design, such as it is, involves subtracting the letters from a rectangle maybe half a millimeter short of their top & bottom extents and a few millimeters longer than their length. Using a chonky font with generous letter spacing may prevent prompt disintegration by weathering:

Plant Marker – craft sticks – LB layout

Engraving the letters marks their uncut sections outside the rectangle, although we know laser char on wood-ish materials fades in sunlight. The two big sticks have Radish engraved with varying density; the darker version looks better against a lighter background never found in an actual garden.

Mary thinks they might be a nice fundraiser for the next Master Gardener Plant Sale.

Outdoor field tests seem appropriate …

2023-04-21