To gain some more experience with the lasercutter Michelle came up with the idea of making a 3D object with the lasercutter by using a slicer. Since i wasn’t at Waag the day we would try this out, i did it myself the next day. I didn’t want to focus too much on the design, so i searched and found THIS nice 3D model to use.
Preparing the file
I loaded the model in C4D to check if i wanted to alter anything and then opened it in slicer for Fusion360.
I haven’t used Slicer for Fusion360 before, so i played around with different setting until i liked the model. Then i went to search for a nice piece of cardboard to use. I measured the cardboard and created a custom material in Slicer
Based on the measurements of the cardboard and the settings of the model Slicer automatically created a file for the lasercutter.
Setting-up the laser cutter
I loaded the file in Lightburn. I selected show all open paths and everything was an open path. I converted the paths to bitmap, because this was the only was i could get rid of the open paths. But the cutter treated the bitmap as an image instead of a line, so i canceled the cut and started again. Because i wanted to see the error i’d run in when not closing the open paths i executed the cutter, but didn’t got an error!
I looked at different settings for cardboard (mine was a little thinner) and choose for Speed 60, Power 50.
The project came out really nice, although it was a hard job to assemble the model.
End result
And so the cardboard kitty-cat was born!
