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

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
World War II Dog Tag Layout

Quite some time ago, I hammered out G-Code to engrave ersatz dog tags for a Cabin Fever demo:

Cabin Fever Dog Tag

A dozen years later, making a World War II dog tag is a whole lot easier:

John Q Public – WWII dog tag

Well, “easier” if you allow laser engraving in white-on-black Trolase using a font intended to mimic a typewriter.

Close enough, methinks.

Which comes from a simple layout:

John Q Public – WWII dog tag – LB layout

The outline traces a scanned image of my father’s tag, fitting a few hand-laid splines around the curves:

John Q Public – WWII dog tag – spline curves

I generated a random serial number based on my father’s draftee status (he was in his early 30s during his South Sea Island tour) and state of residence; my apologies to anyone carrying it for real. His blood type was A and (I think) the religion code marks him as “Brethren”, a common group in my ancestry.

Given the outline, various plastics, and a laser, other effects become possible:

WWII dog tag outline test

It might come in handy for something, someday.

The LightBurn SVG layout as GitHub Gist:

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2023-02-20
Laser Engraved Fabric

This is more along the lines of searing the fuzz, rather than actual engraving:

Laser Engraved Fabric – cotton knit

The top row is 15% power at 400 mm/s, the bottom is 25% power, and the fabric was a cotton t-shirt from the Box o’ Shop Wipes.

Applying the higher power to the inside of sweatpants fabric, whatever that might be:

Laser Engraved Fabric – sweatpants

Both of those were easier to see in the slanting sunlight of a later winter afternoon.

The best results come from the lowest feasible power applied at the fastest practical speed, with obvious size and complexity limitations.

I think this will most useful on a removable tag labeling a piece (perhaps cut from a larger pattern), rather than branding the piece itself.

2023-02-13
Laser-Engraved Bentley Snowflakes

Algorithmic snowflakes make for interesting coasters and decorations:

Snowflake Hangers – frosted

But they lack the complexity of real snowflakes:

Wilson Bentley Photomicrograph of Dendrite Star Snowflake No. 842 – SIA-SIA2013-09114 – rescaled

That’s from the Smithsonian collection of the Wilson Bentley snowflake photos from back in the 1890s, all of which are CC0 = Public Domain images.

So pick a nice image, say #842, clean it up a bit, and isolate the flake from the background:

Snowflake No. 842 – SIA-SIA2013-09114 – isolated

Pick a threshold level to prettify the result:

Snowflake No. 842 – SIA-SIA2013-09114 – Threshold

Then engrave it into the back of an acrylic mirror scrap, so the darkest parts become most transparent:

Bentley 842 – engraved mirror – white background

Which looks better when seen against an illuminated background:

Bentley 842 – engraved mirror – color background A

Well, I think it does:

Bentley 842 – engraved mirror – color background B

Maybe four different snowflakes atop those squares?

Gotta get this ready for the next snow season …

2023-02-08