#lasergasm

I've been busy with a couple of smaller projects this week, like a GoPro® kitesurf line-mount and a new baseplate for my helping hands.

The original GoPro® part costs around 50 € (for a fairly small piece of plastic!), but luckily there's already an alternative design on thingiverse. After a bit of tuning, the 3D print came out quite well, but I'm a bit worried about stability of this low-cost print in a fast, high powered environment. Will have to test.

So for the baseplate, I decided to cut a piece of plywood from the leftovers box to the required size using laser technology!

However, being completely useless with Inkscape, I needed to bring my trusty lab mate @mhu3ni in for support, who more than satisfied my needs by additionally engraving a witty bitmap over the whole plate..

Quite intrigued by the quality of the engraving, I came back the following day in order to play a bit more with the laser. After all, it was freefab* Thursday!

Cutting and engraving using the Epilog turned out to be quite easy, really just a matter of pasting a picture into the template, scaling it to the desired size and burning it with a high-energy laser into whatever cheap little piece of wood you like. How James Bond is that!

So, check R's briefing video for an introduction on how to use the new laser, and keep in mind that this is an expensive, high-energy piece of equipment. So please, try not to burn down the building: Don't let the device run unattended!

I found the resulting wooden plates quite stunning, as their look changes in varying light conditions and they're nice to touch, like delicate carvings.

So, I'm very happy with the new laser, it's much more comfortable to work with and I'm looking forward to putting some fancy engravings on future projects!

*complimentary napkins