A week or two ago I ran across a deal on an air filter for my laser cutter. This one is made by the manufacturer for use in malls when you can’t exhaust externally. It is turned on and off via USB through the software, so it is very convenient. I tested it out and it works great!!!! I ran it cutting acrylic for about 2 minutes and there was absolutely no smell. See the pictures below.
For Jen I decided I would make her something special. This year I printed a geared heart for her. I think it came out pretty nice.
At our local hackerspace we have a waste oil heater that some of our members built. Right now we are using a stainless steel bowl for the burn plate. We needed a proper solution. To do that, we got a piece of aluminum round and needed to create a bowl in the middle with a 10 degree angle. My lathe can’t handle stock 6″ in diameter so I decided to use the mill. I drew the model, then set the operations in the CAM software. This was the first time that I milled a 3 dimensional piece, rather than just a 2.5d part. You can see the results below.
This evening I designed a set of gears using a piece of software called gearotic motion to build a set of gears. I used my laser cutter to cut them out. One of them was smaller that a quarter. See the below pictures:
Here is one of the involute cutter forms that I recently got to be able to cut gears properly. Now I just need an arbor to mount it up.
So last weekend when we were running the laser cutter at the hackerspace, we got double images on certain items with small details. We thought it was the something funny about the images we were sending to the laser. Tonight I was etching some aluminum business cards and noticed the doubling happening again. Frustrated, I turned to the advanced manual and went through the tuning steps. By optimizing the settings, I was able to make a dramatic difference. You can see the results below:
Today I fired up the laser cutter with the new rotary fixture. It was a little tricky to figure out positioning, but I think I got it right. Check out the result.
I’ve been working on an Acme upgrade for the Prusa for a little while. Previously I threadmilled the nuts out of derlin. Today I turned down the 3/8 Acme rod on both ends. One end fits into the 608zz bearing in the MG lower end and the other fits into a coupler. Tomorrow I’ll be making a set of couplers to mount up to the motors. Venom is almost ready!
Got the new batteries in for the toy quad and wanted to run a test. You can see the result below 
I saw this image image on ladyada that I thought would make a cool laser cut acrylic piece. Dan decided to turn it into a vector image and I cut it this evening. I think it came out really sharp …
I also took a close up to demonstrate the smoothness of cut close up.
