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: Laser Cutter

Tiny T-Rex: Leg Modification

Having recently built a herd of Tiny T-Rexes from cardboard, I finally discovered they didn’t stand quite right because their feet don’t reach the ground.

The smaller orange outline is the original foot:

Tiny T-Rex – 100mm – foot comparison

The larger red outline came from a bit of node editing:

Tiny T-Rex – 100mm – reshaped foot

I tweaked the original body to include the realigned foot shape to ensure the feet don’t get pried apart, as we’re not bound by anatomical accuracy.

None of which matters for cardboard bonded with copious amounts of hot-melt glue, but I had smaller plans:

Acrylic Tiny Rexes

The center piece is 6 mm translucent gray acrylic from the longsuffering IBM Printer Stand, with armor from 3 mm yellow on the left and a mix of 3 mm green / 1.5 mm transparent green on the right, held together with 3M 300LSE adhesive sheet.

They are insufferably cute:

Acrylic Tiny Rex – detail

Red eyes, because why not?

2026-11-10
Laser Cuttery: Expedient Material Support

A remnant of acrylic looked like it would come in handy, but had a bent edge tall enough to collide with the laser nozzle. I eventually realized I could cut it with the edge downward, completely out of the way:

Laser cutting – cardboard supports – side view

The supports are cardboard strips sliced from the cardboard stash with a razor knife and hand-bent specifically to avoid recursive yak shaving:

Laser cutting – cardboard supports – top view

The cut was a simple straight line extending a bit beyond each end, using a bending mark to align the piece with the cut path. The scrap dropped free as the laser cleared the right end.

Nothing fancy, but it worked exactly right the first time.

2026-11-09
Cardboard Spiders: Nesting Assistance

Scaling the spider layout to match the 6.8 mm dual-layer cardboard originally holding a monitor turned out well:

Cardboard Spider – garage right

The LightBurn nesting routine needed three equal-sized sheets for all the pieces, but I wanted a spider for each of the two garage door lights:

Cardboard Spider – garage left

So I grouped pairs of the abdomen shapes in the obvious (to me) arrangement, selected all but the body and legs, and LightBurn nested them on a single sheet:

Spider – Nested sheet 1

It easily nested the body and legs on a second sheet:

Spider – Nested sheet 2

However, I needed that second sheet for the second spider:

Cardboard Spider – sheet 1 cutting

So I manually arranged one big leg and one small leg to fit each end of the four narrow box flaps to get sixteen legs:

Cardboard Spider – leg cutting

The two bodies (the weird shape on Sheet 2) barely fit on two of the four small box-closing flaps, two spiders emerged from the pieces adorned with dollops of hot-melt glue, and the cardboard stockpile got the two remaining small flaps that will surely come in handy for something.

The eyes are fluorescent green acrylic sized for a press fit.

I love it when a plan comes together …

2026-10-29
Demon Sheep: White Chipboard vs. Blue Masking Tape

A small flock / herd / mob of Demon Sheep (tipoff: red eyes) appeared:

Demon sheep – herd

The Lesser Sheep came from white chipboard covered with blue masking / painter’s tape to prevent soot smudging:

Demon sheep – blue tape masking

Which was a test to see if I could peel the tape off without damaging the pristine white surface:

Demon sheep – blue tape damage

Mostly, yes, but not with sufficient consistency for any project where appearance matters. With the tape pressed firmly enough to stay flat (lest soot deposit between the chipboard and the tape), even blue tape’s low-tack adhesive bonds all too well with the paper surface.

On the upside, LightBurn’s nesting handles the layout inside a 150 mm wide rectangle of sufficient length:

Sheep – nested in blue tape strip

The eyes are press-fit cylinders of fluorescent red acrylic that will, I expect, be invisible on All Hallow’s Eve.

2026-10-28
Standard Cardboard Box Layouts

Being in the midst of conjuring cardboard into seasonal driveway decorations:

Halloween beetles and Tiny-Rexes

I collected all the cardboard box layouts into a LightBurn Art Library:

Cardboard Box Layouts

The tiny gray grid over on the left represents the 700×500 mm laser platform: chop the boxes apart and burn the flaps separately.

The Amazon box codes represent what’s in the Great Heap o’ Boxes at the moment and I’m whittling away at the Home Depot boxes that moved us here. Amazon has approximately a zillion different sizes, few of which I’ve ever seen.

Now that LightBurn has a true nesting function, you can select the shapes-to-cut + a cardboard sheet and cram everything into as many of those sheets as needed:

Sheep – nested in HD box flaps

The Art Library file format isn’t documented, so I exported all the layouts into one gargantuan SVG image as a GitHub Gist:

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view raw Cardboard Box Layouts.svg hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The SVG image has a 5 mm stroke width to make the vectors visible at that scale. LightBurn ignores the stroke width, but a real SVG handler will make them look like crayon on a paper towel.

They’re all colored blue, corresponding to LightBurn layer C01, for better visibility, but put them (back) on tool layer T2 so they don’t get cut.

2026-10-27
Window Film Mullion Filler

The living room windows suffer from all the thermal problems you might expect in a late-1960s house, despite the slightly more recent storm panes, so I’ve been adding insulating film during the cold season. This works surprisingly well, although the tape holding the film tends to lose its grip in the angle between the (real, not pretend!) mullions and the window sill.

This year I added triangular fillers to ease the corner:

LR Window Film – mullion filler

They’re Desk Signs from boxes.py, with the bottoms angled by 2.5° to compensate for the slightly misaligned sill and a small cutout clearing the paint accumulation in the corner:

LR Window mullion filler – LightBurn layout

A strip of tape down each side of the mullion and across the filler anchors the film, producing a slightly baggy fit. Next year I’ll use only one strip down the middle.

2026-10-16
Layered Paper: Whimsical Perching Bird

Start by scanning a page from the (©2013 paper!) Whimsical Designs Coloring Book and opening it in GIMP:

Whimsical Perching Bird – outline

Mary says the book is intended for appliqué quilting, which seems close enough to layered paper for my simple purposes.

Select the black lines and grow the selection to about 1.5 mm wide:

Whimsical Perching Bird – mask selection

After some editing, convert the selection to a path, then save the path as SVG to create the Black Mask layer.

Clear the selection and bucket-fill the outlines with cheerful colors:

Whimsical Perching Bird – colored

If you’re fussy, you might devote a sheet of black paper to the eye, but I just dabbed a dot of black marker.

Load into LightBurn and knock out paths on successive layers:

Whimsical Perching Bird – LightBurn layout

Stack sheets of colored paper in the appropriate order, Fire The Laser, paste the layers together, and frame:

Whimsical Perching Bird – framed

After working through the Cornell Painted Warblers, it really was that easy!

Stipulated: I cannot draw even simple Art, but I enjoy my time in the engine room.

2026-10-12