Lasers! And gears!

[gfish]

Last week I finally got around to trying out the laser cutter at Metrix. It was so easy. Walked in with a USB drive with a SVG file I made in Inkscape, 6 minutes and $15 later I had the following:



(8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 40 and 60 teeth.)

Let me emphasize what a phenomenal price $15 is for 7 gears. This is a fabrication technique that deserves some serious study. As such, I'm working on adapting the design for a mechanical clock. I should be able to get everything made this way except the weight and some random pieces of hardware laser cut.

Comments

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

Sa-weet! CNC laser cutting is one of the best machining processes to come along in quite a while.

Finding a place that will do metal gears that cheap makes me concede that metal, rather than cardboard, for your digital sundial may be the way to go.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

Or are those plywood gears?

[keystricken.livejournal.com]

Looks like plywood to me. Laser-cut wood has some lovely distinctive dark edges, as if they'd been lightly singed (which in fact they have).

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Plywood, yeah. They will only cut wood and acrylic there.