Laser cutting technology lark...

After showing my idea of what could possibly be my end piece, I was advised that maybe using a laser cutting machines would really finish the piece off and avoid the drawn lines, uneven slices and odd shapes, due to human error. This machine would be able to cut each piece the exact same! Genius.....

So as I attended the laser cutting session (first entry of my blog) I had a rough idea of how to go about the make the template. So I drew up the template in Adobe Illustrator (if I am completely honest it was the most difficult part in the making seen as I am not that confident in using that program as yet) so I ended up with this.....

This was then opened up into Corel Draw X4 software, where I changed the lines to a 'hairline' width so the laser cutting machine would recognise it as a 'cut' line and the score lines would be thicker than 0.25mm to indicate the software to 'score' the line. I ran a test sheet, to see whether the laser was set correctly and it was however..... there was only one slight problem....

The cut was perfect, a nice crisp edge, no burnt edges just that...

I didn't set up the machine properly, I thought the page on the screen was indicating the A4 paper, but unknown to my knowledge it was actually the bed of the laser cutting machine. So they were too large and only half the size. EPIC FAIL. However after I set the machine up again (properly) I was on a roll and nothing was stopping me. A couple of cheeky JPEGS and movie of the process in action....

The novelty quickly wore off seen as I did 50 A4 pages of templates.