Making a cover

I bought a vacuum pump off of eBay not too long ago to use for a vacuum clamping system.  While its works well, (and I’ll post about it later), there are two fan blades on each side that are exposed.  I wanted to cover them up to prevent a foot, hand or other object from making its way into the blades.

I decided that it would be easiest to make a cover on my laser cutter.  So I thought up a design, modeled it in a 3d program, and it came out like this …

I had originally hoped on doing a swirl, but I settled for a more classic pattern.  So the next step is to turn it into something that is usable.  The laser cutter acts like a print driver, and I’ve typically used Corel Draw to send the images to it.  While some may grimace at the product, its commonly used for laser cutting systems.  The dxf that I imported (and duplicated) looks a bit like this.

Notice that the color is red and that the lines are hairline width.  This tells the print driver to vector cut those lines as opposed to raster cutting.  There is a tremendous difference in the speed of one approach versus the other.  The magic happens when I click print …

You can see from the video that it is completing the outer circle on the first cover.  I’m using 1/8″ acrylic because its all thats required and I have plenty on hand.  When the cuts are complete, it looks like the following:

I think it cut those out pretty well.  You can see the first set of cuts on the left were from measurement errors.  Like the old adage says, “Measure twice and cut once”.  So lastly, I have a picture of the cover installed.  It actually came out very well.  The size was perfect.  I think the restraints could be a bit better, but they will do just fine.