Press-Fit Construction, 3rd Attempt

SO I did a 3rd attempt. For this attempt, I duct-taped the corners of the board down, because the panel I was working with this time seemed to have a slight warp to it.

My settings:

speed: 8%

power: 100%

Frequency: 1450Hz

Didn’t cut through. Anywhere. The whole thing was only a partial cut. Which is odd because during the previous attempt, even after the first pass of the laser, *most* of the components were all the way cut out (there were just a few areas hanging on). Not this time, though. I’m chalking it up to inconsistency in the composition of the material. Otherwise I have no idea.

Once this cut is done, I will have to go home. I am out of wood and my train back to Boston leaves soon. I have one more idea to strengthen the joints that I’m cutting, but I doubt there will be time to try it out before the project is due on Wednesday.

Right now, all of the cutting is being done such that the vertical lines which perforate the joints and make them flexible are also running in the same direction as the grain of the wood. This is necessary because all my wood panels have the grain running crosswise rather than lengthwise, and they only fit into the cutting bed one way. If I’m willing to waste an entire panel, though, I could run the wall-strip diagonally across the entire thing, which would probably give it enough structure to withstand the bending even after the excessive charring which is necessary to make the laser cut all the way through.

Or I could just wait until we get a new, *level* bed for the laser cutter. Yeah I’m a poor craftsman. Watch me blame my tools!

But the fact of the matter is that the major benefit of a laser cutter, besides its speed, is that it is supposed to be a precision instrument which can cut materials into very specific shapes with a high degree of accuracy. Right now, it doesn’t do that, and it severely limits the types of things you can do with it. Now I don’t know if a new bed will fix all of this. I’ve been told that the lens is not being maintained as it should be and as such there may be an additional focusing issue to contend with. This is a public shop, after all, and like all public workspaces, maintenance of equipment is severely neglected at best and more often than not it doesn’t happen at all, so at a certain point it’s just going to turn into an exercise in adapting to a sub-optimal set of tools. Still, I hold out hope that things will get at least marginally better soon.