Laser Cutter

This is a question that a lot of hobbyists and makers (should) ask before jumping into the world of computer aided manufacturing. Based on my experience I hope to make your choice easier or at least give you a brief overview of what you can expect from these different machines. …

Editor’s note: We… forgot to publish this article from Nadya last year (sorry!). Nadya joined us to help with marketing, and ended up learning and doing a lot of digital making with our laser cutter—here’s her story. As a non-coder in a heavily tech environment, I found myself gravitating towards…

A week ago I had the realization that if our healthcare professionals fighting COVID go down, we all go down. After a few weeks in quarantine and watching the news every day, I decided that I would stop feeling helpless and try to help. I have a few tools, so…

For the brainstorming section of this assignment, I wanted to think about a variety of different ways to use the idea of creating something three dimensional out of two-dimensional pieces. I don’t have a particular theme that I want to do but I would like to make something that is…

Exploring Furniture Design — My goal for this semester is to make a series of tables with my signature koi fish element. The boards will be made of pine. The ponds and sand holes will be made by using pockets with the CNC router. For the ponds, I’ll use laser cut blue acrylic to…

Last week, I had the opportunity to share my passion project idea with my classmates in Studio in Creative Technologies. The professor, Erin Riley, gave me an excellent suggestion to try laser-etching the maps. I really appreciated this suggestion, because I wasn’t thrilled about my solution of vinyl cutting stencils…

3D printers have become almost synonymous with the Maker Movement, and with some justification as they’re capable of spitting out nearly any shape imaginable. …

Almost every hobbyist laser cutter on the market uses a CO2 laser, because they’re affordable and versatile. Even a relatively low power CO2 laser can cut most non-metallic materials. But, metals are usually out of the question for CO2 lasers unless they’re very high power, making it impractical for hobbyists…

About 4 years ago THS raised funds to buy a cheap Chinese K40 laser cutter. These laser cutters have become very popular within the hacker/maker spaces because of their cost and hack-ability. For most of 2017 the laser cutter was inoperable. We had decided the software that came with the…