Part II: experimenting with the laser cutter
Making something boring and symmetrical was actually kinda easy. During the tutorial, we learned about the different ways the laser cutter can cut your material. There are three cutting modes: SCAN, CUT and DOT. SCAN simply means that it will create a line on your material. It burns the material slightly, without cutting through it. CUT means cutting through the material, very straightforward. Lastly, DOT will create a dotted line. This will create a line that is easier to fold. You can increase or decrease the intervals of dots, making a stronger or weaker folding line. I started with a simple design, using Adobe Illustrator.
The bottom part serves as the boring, symmetrical part, also known as the static part, while the top part serves as the expressive, asymmetrical part, also knows as the dynamic part. I was going to use this design to experiment with the laster cutter. For both parts of the design, I was going to have to think of some iterations that show my progress to the final design.
While I was shopping for blue paper to use in the Riso printer (I was editor that week), I also found a good material for my laser cutter assignment. It's called recycled anthracite carton, and cost 1,50 euro per sheet. I bought it at De Vlieger in Amsterdam.
Dynamic iterations
For the first iteration, I was going to print the design using only the CUT and SCAN modes on the laser cutter. I wanted to see how strong those scanned lines would be. By lowering the laser's speed here, I would be able to create a deeper line, without cutting through it. This would cause it to fold better.
Note: before uploading a file to the laser cutter program, make sure to save your Illustrator file as an Illustrator 8 file!
When you load the Illustrator file into the laster cutter program, you then need to give each lines one of three colours (RGB to keep it simple). You can give different tasks to the different colours. For example: if red is set to SCAN (with a certain power and speed), all lines of the design you made red will be scanned with those settings. If you want two lines to be scanned with different settings, you can add a fourth colour.
For CUT, I used the parameters from the program's library for 2mm cardboard: speed = 22.0 and laser 1 = 50%--50%. I used the standard SCAN settings for the other lines. This is however where I ran into some problems. I wasn't able to change the colour of individual lines. The laser cutter program had somehow grouped certain lines together. Even the Maker's Lab staff hadn't see anything like this before. They recommended I change the colours of the lines in Illustrator beforehand. The colours would also appear in the laser cutter program. I tried this and luckily it worked. From here on you can send the file to the laser cutter itself.
Note: Unfortunately, I am not able to document the precise steps you need to undertake when using the laser cutter. I was planning to note this down after week 4, but before I had the chance to do that, the Maker's Lab closed its doors.
After the laser cutter was done, this was the result:
Because they were scanning lines, it was still very firm and wouldn't bend very well. I concluded that I had to turn these scanned lines into dotted lines. You can do this very easily by just changing the command within the laser cutter program from SCAN to DOT. Adjusting this and cutting it yielded the following result:
I concluded that there are two few dots to even consider it a dotted line. It's not a line and therefore I was barely able to fold it properly. The dots had to become wider. For this, the dot time needed to be longer. You can change the dot time and interval as shown below:
I decided to increase the dot time a bit to see what happens. This was the result:
I noticed almost no difference from the second iteration. It's still very hard to fold these "lines". I needed to increase the dot time even further, which I did. The following came out of it:
These can be called dotted lines! They fold a lot better. I wanted to see what would happen if I increase the power of the laser, the result of which was:
Nothing notable changed here. The increase in power caused the paper to be covered in a bit of smudge however, because there was a more intense burn. Unnecessary! I changed the power back to 13%.
Important!
Unfortunately, this is where the documentation for this week ends. I got by the end of this week and didn't finish the assignment. The plan in the upcoming weeks was to continue working on the static iterations, the final product where the contrast can be seen clearly, and the bounded book. Because the school closed and we were forced to work from home, I never got a chance to do so. I regret this very much, because now I ended up with an unfinished assignment.
The plan was to work on the dynamic design even more; making it better. I wanted the five individual limbs of my design to get hands, feet and a scary face, making it this freaky looking creature. It would be the dynamic contrast of the two: expressive, asymmetrical and 3D. For the static part I would have to experiment with the SCAN, CUT and DOT commands. Using them, without turning the 2D material into something 3D. The result would be something boring and symmetrical. Uninteresting to the eye. It's unfortunate, because I would have really liked to work on the design of the creature. Something to put up in my room or something. I really hope I can bring this idea to fruition in the future, when everything is back to normal.
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