Tag: Art-ish

This is definitely not recommended practice:

It’s the sheet of 3/8 inch = 9 mm vintage acrylic that Came With The House™ and what you see is the relatively unwarped result of several months of pressure. The wood sheet in front puts the left edge mostly flat on the platform, with the steel disk weighting the rear end down; the front end sticks out through the laser’s pass-through door.

The general idea was to cut a rectangle that would be flat enough for the shapes I actually needed:

They’re grips for a set of Blockface printing shapes. The alert reader will note the rectangle sits atop three spikes, not the usual four; it was flat enough for the purpose, not actually flat.

The OMTech laser claims to be 60 W, but has an over-amped 50 W tube that’s barely adequate for the task. The cuts required two passes:

• 5 mm/s @ 90% cuts almost all the way through
• 10 mm/s @ 90% clears the cut enough to have some shapes drop out and the others be easily pushed through

Cranking the tube current that high isn’t recommended practice, either, but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

All’s well that ends well, though:

I also cut the Blockface shapes from double-faced adhesive foam and stamp pad rubber:

To my utter astonishment, the rubber cuts did not smell like a tire fire and the neighbors did not rise up in arms.

I cut several sets of grips / foam / rubber and sent them off for final assembly. The recipient seems delighted with the results and has been hand-printing up a storm.

Trying a sequence of offset and raster filling produced a credible 0.5 mm deep inlay pocket in a chunk of acrylic:

The odd pattern inside the pocket comes from the offset fill:

Combining the two fill patterns produces a smoother bottom in the pocket, but it’s a good thing nobody will ever see it from the back side, because the offset fill concentrations chew through the entire 3mm sheet.

A spade-shaped adhesive sheet bonded the veneer into the pocket, after which I sanded the surface flat with 200 grit sandpaper and hit it with some polyurethane sealer. Next time I’ll knock the finished surface flat with 400 grit paper.

The gray acrylic disk has a rebate around its rear rim for the “gold” ring, with the adhesive disk gluing the black disk to the front:

Which looks like this when it’s stuck together:

I don’t like the raggedy surface of the rebate above the ring, although it’s not too awful in person.

Having gotten reasonable results with the acrylic pocket, I cut an acrylic spade and stuck it in place with another bit of adhesive sheet, leaving it standing proud of the surface:

The red earring used up one of the hundred slugs left over from the capsule plate; I’m ready for a surge in demand.

The adhesive sheet is workable in disk form, but the spade shape is entirely too fiddly. A dab of acrylic adhesive would likely work just as well and be easier all around.

Stipulated: they’re cute, but not that cute.

They’re not fancy marquetry, but they look pretty good:

The darker areas are laser-engraved with the usual SCP warning label geometry.

The left set was engraved through blue masking tape, which increased the exposure, added no benefit, and required fiddly cleanup. Won’t make that mistake again.

The middle one has the darkest wood of the set with the lighter part not exposed to the laser.

They’re slightly smaller and much lighter than the plastic versions in order to fit them on the remaining DIY veneer plywood from the knitting stitch counters.

Rather than make another fixture for the backside branding, I cut adapters using the two outlines and dropped the hollow triangles into the fixture:

Two layers of veneer feel about right, although the layers should not have their grains oriented in parallel as these do. The PSA sheet on the back veneer holds them together, but they’re too flexy for confidence.

The contrast between gentle natural wood (using a generous interpretation of “natural” for veneer with a PSA layer) and the SFnal SCP warning label symbology is definitely amusing.

Engraving the vector SCP warning label geometry into yellow-on-black Trolase reduces the handwork to wiping off the dust:

The alert reader will note two missing holes due to an unfortunate oversight while rearranging the layout. One can adroitly fix such errors if the cut shapes don’t move, which is how it worked out:

With the obverse done, another fixture aligns them for a branding pass on the reverse:

This is starting to make sense in a peculiar sort of way …

Scaling the vectorized SCP warning labels to fit 4 inch cork disks produces a stack of Danger Zone coasters:

I particularly like the Cognitohazard and Autonomous Object symbols. The Nonstandard Spacetime symbol comes in dead last; if you make one, use very little kerf offset.

Come to find out yellow is utterly unforgiving of smudges / smoke stains; orange is better, albeit non-canon. I cut them face-up through a layer of blue masking tape, which worked surprisingly well, except for a few areas where I didn’t apply enough paint: the chipboard fibers became one with the tape.

The cork disks arrive pre-cut with a PSA sheet, so using a jig for better alignment with the assembled chipboard layer would be a Good Idea™. These were assembled by feel, which is good for about half a millimeter.

A better process: cut an array of the shapes from a large yellow sheet, fit the black inlays from the back, stick the whole affair to a large cork sheet, then cut the circular outlines where small misalignments wouldn’t matter.

In production, it would make more sense to cut all the pieces from blank white chipboard, paint them in groups, then assemble everything.

Best: having me realize nobody else wants coasters.