Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Mary’s Hens and Chicks gardening group is having a White Elephant gift swap, where one can get rid of anything vaguely garden-related without repercussions, so I ran off a set of eponymous coasters for practice:
Hens and Chicks Coasters – overview
They’re 3 mm laser plywood with English Chestnut stain and satin polyurethane sealant, with PSA cork on the underside. Even if (IMO) the stain came out too dark on some of them, they’re perfectly suited for the occasion.
It’s ordinary laser-grade 3 mm plywood with another wood inlay, sanded flat and covered with polyurethane sealer.
The key attraction: not fiddling with tiny veneer bits.
Cut the recesses in one pass with enough energy to make them at least as deep as the veneer thickness:
Marquetry test – plywood cutting
Press the veneer onto aluminum tape, taking care to avoid wrinkles and folds, and cut away everything that doesn’t go into those recesses:
Marquetry test – veneer cutting
Which looks gnarly when you’re done:
Marquetry test – veneer on tape
I cut the aluminum tape to fit within the corner targets around the plywood layout, thus simplifyingmaking possible aligning the positive veneer shapes with the negative plywood shapes while being unable to see either of them.
Slather wood glue over the plywood, make sure even the tiniest recesses are filled, align the aluminum, clamp the two firmly together, wait for a few days while the glue cures in that airless space, then peel off the aluminum:
Marquetry test – peeled
Which looked so awful I thought that was a disaster, not least because the veneer stood proud of the plywood, so it remained on the back of the bench for far too long.
Eventually, having deployed the sander for another project, I sanded the veneer flush with the plywood to reveal the nearly perfect results in the lead picture. There’s a bit of smoke stain left in the grain, but the tiniest recesses have at least some veneer fill and the surface is entirely smooth.
The overlaid circles worked out:
Marquetry test – detail 1
The darkest block and the smaller lines are badly smoke-stained veneer, as they have wood grain visible under magnification. I think those may not have fully entered their recesses and we’re seeing a very thin veneer layer soaked with soot-filled wood glue.
Another view:
Marquetry test – detail 2
The checkerboard squares worked well;
Marquetry test – squares 1
To my astonishment, even the 0.5 mm squares have some veneer inside, as do the 0.5×1.0 mm rectangles on the left:
Marquetry test – squares 2
Not knowing any better, there’s no kerf offset on any of the figures and they’re separated by about the 0.2 mm width of the focused spot.
Aligning the veneer to the recesses was tricky and I was not at all sure it had happened. I think larger shapes would be much easier and might give off a confirming squish as they meet their sockets.
Gotta try that again without the benefit of beginner’s luck.
Having used desiccant in tea bags inside the PolyDryer boxes with some success, I wanted to see what happens with more exposed surface area:
Polydryer Box desiccant tray – installed
The tray (jawbreaker boxes.py URL) is 2 mm chipboard with a quartet of additional notches fitting the protrusions in the bottom of the Polydryer box:
Polydryer Box desiccant tray – assembly
Although you’ll find plenty of printed trays, many with ingenious perforated lids, this was quick & easy:
Polydryer Box desiccant tray – cutting
They’re painfully prone to dumping their contents, despite the dividers which are intended to dissuade the beads from taking collective action and surging over the slightly higher outer walls. Fortunately, the dump occurs inside a sealed box and is entirely survivable.
Distributing 25 g of silica gel neatly fills the sections:
The ancient and much–repaired Sears humidifier works better in its new location across the living room with its front raised a few millimeters, which may have something to do with its plastic housing supporting a pair of heavy water containers for a few decades.
After fiddling around with shims to find the proper height, these feet descended from the Husky workbench feet:
Humidifier Caster Feet – installed
They’re glued up from 3 mm plywood sitting on a 1 mm layer of cork:
Humidifier Caster Feet – clamping
The humidifier seems much happier with its casters 4 mm above the floor. Seems awfully fussy to me, but there’s no arguing with success.
The knife’s silhouette came from a few minutes with GIMP, because cleaning up the edges on a graphics tablet is easier than fiddling with precise spline curves. Export the selection as an SVG, import into LightBurn, set to Fill, and Fire The Laser:
Garden knife sheath
The upper block in the LightBurn layout is an oversized rectangle so I could cut that out first, stick craft adhesive on both sides, trim the edges, drop it back into the hole, then cut the middle part of the sheath.
It’s made of recycled through-dyed chipboard and it won’t last forever, but that’s not a problem because these things tend to wander off before they disintegrate.
I must do a few more for the other garden bucket, but those should be straightforward.
The next morning found it huddled against the cold:
Mantis – chilled
It had reached operating temperature and gone about its business a few hours later.
I deployed a cardboard Mantis in its honor as a seasonally appropriate yard decoration, but mine didn’t survive the night nearly as well as the real one:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 