Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Laser Cut a Slot-Together Octopus Lamp”.
Thanks for joining me again today, I’m going to show you how to make this cool, customizable laser-cut, octopus land – don’t worry if you don’t have a laser cutter I’ll, also give you some tips on how you can make it with other tools. I designed this lamp in Autodesk fusion 360. It is insanely, powerful, CAD and cam software that is completely free for hobbyists. Now, I’m not going to make you sit through the entire design process for this lamp. If you want to see that, though it is linked in the article below, I would like to share two tips that made my life much easier. The first is this user parameters in fusion 360 are fantastic. You go to this drop-down open up parameters and create a new user parameter right here, enter a value and from this point forward, whenever you make something and assign it this value, it’s something you can come back and change later.
For example, on this lamp I set the thickness to be three millimeters and all of those little pieces that fit together use this user value here of three millimeters. If I bought some material that happen to be three and a half millimeters, the file won’t work except. I can hop into fusion 360 open up this menu and change the three to let’s say three point: five and it will adjust the entire design on the fly so that everything fits beautifully.
The second tip is that laying out a DXF file for laser cutting out of fusion 360 was a bit confusing, and I got some help from tailor sign from Autodesk. That explained an easy way to do it. You first start by aligning all of your parts on a single plane.
You can do this with an ax joint with using a joint or by using the align tool. Once you have them all on a single plane. You simply select one face hit. The new sketch button and then right-click choose project and select all the other faces. You want to be in this DXF file. Once you have them all selected, you can just right-click on that sketch and export as a DXF. Then you have one single file with all of the faces from separate parts. After that you can go straight to your laser or into illustrator.
After I had the final gxs file, I brought it into illustrator for two reasons: one I wanted to rearrange it so that it would fit in my laser, but also so that it could be printed on letter-sized paper out of a normal printer and two. I wanted to add some engraving so that my octopus had little suckers on the tentacles here are a couple: laser cutting tips if you’re going to be doing this file or really any file, if you have something that needs engraving on both sides, simply make a mirrored Copy of it on the same material, then, once you’ve cut out the shape, you can pull the two pieces out, swap sides and engrave again without having to reveal your machine or align anything. This is the same way. Fixturing works on something like a CNC mill or router.
The second tip is that you can change the darkness of your engraving by adjusting the speed and power of your laser. For this example, I wanted a nice dark sucker that you can see on that tentacle from across the room. So I ended up going about ten percent power, but I slowed the laser way down to about 50 percent speed. Usually it engraved at almost 300 % speed and those were fairly visible. Now that it’s cut comes the most fun part, just snapping it all together, it takes shape before your eyes and it looks so cool. So what about those of you that don’t have a laser cutter simply print out the design tape it onto your material and trace it with an exacto knife? Now some people who are in woodworking will actually glue the design to the material cut it out and then sand it later, which might be nice, but I don’t have a convenient way to sand it off.
So I am going to tape it on trace it out with an exacto knife, and then I’m left with these mark in the material and here’s a tip for the parts where your pieces fit together, find a drill bit. That’S the right size and drill the inside spot of these pieces that groove together it’s much easier than trying to cut it. Once you’ve got your holes drilled, you could cut this with a scroll saw or a jigsaw or whatever else you happen to have on here. Now the cool thing about this design is, since I’ve placed 12 holes around the central point, you can rearrange the tentacles in any way you’d like there’s lots of options here. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. If you want the file to cut this on your own, you can find them linked in the article below be sure to LIKE and subscribe to this website for more tutorials and projects for all skill levels.
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