Hockey artwork completed

I took about 3.5 hours and produced the following final piece. 

The pens used were:

Sakura Gelly Roll Classic Red M19, Blue M36, Black M49

Sakura Gelly Roll Metallic Gold M551, Blue M536, Green M526, Red M519, Silver M553

Signo Black

PIGMA fine tip red, blue, green and purple

The PIGMA fine tips were used for the goalie mask, the smaller crossing hockey sticks and the face off inner circles.

 

 Hockey Stencil Cut and sketch booked

The lasers have been moved into their own dedicated room separate from the woodshop and metal working/welding area which makes for a better temperature controlled, quieter and cleaner work environment. Seth also recently recalibrated and cleaned the lasers after the renovation of the makerspace in early August and I enjoyed very clean cuts at low powers with no charring, burning or microcracking on the back side of the stencil. Notice that I am now using a light purple tape which is low tack/delicate removal 3M brand painter's tape (60 safe removal period). The run took almost 6 minutes to complete using 20 different layers, my most complex design to date.

Today I completed my coloring plan in my sketch book and next up is to actually do the drawing on 130 lb white cardstock. I toyed with the idea of using a wide 18 kt gold brush stroke to frame the hockey scene but decided against it because so many of the hockey objects are small and thin and the broad reflective strokes might clash with that fine detail. 

Fixing a stiff guide snake and air tubing to laser head

Fixing a stiff guide snake and air tubing to laser head

Seth and I worked on improving the large heavy bend in the stiff snake air tubing on the 4 inch focal length laser. The joints and vertebra on the hard plastic guide snake were growing stiff with time such that there was a large curl that would threaten to clip the underside of the top of the laser housing, at least when moving the gantry to the rear of the machine.

At first we thought that the 6 mm nylon tubing was getting stiff or hardened with use and time and so initially ordered a fresh loop of 20 ft tubing from Boss Laser. But after running the old tubing out and the new tubing in, we found the old and new tubing to be equally flexible, so we then knew the problem was due to the hard plastic snake guide. In fact, we found a number of vertebra cracked on the stretch closet to the laser head. We used cable ties (the broader the better) to flatten and secure the cracks and then inserted the metal spine of about 8 inches under the cable ties.

A combination of those broad strap cable ties and the thin straight metal rod were combined to keep the front part of the guide snake closest to the laser head lying much flatter. It is best to attach the cable ties so that the head of the tie faces up and not contact the gantry guides. We also checked that the metal spine did not hit any part of the system. This is a temporary solution until we purchase a new snake guide, including possibly one made out of metal which will be (1) heavier in loop formation with lower and tighter bends and (2) less likely to crack and easier to clean. The metal snake guide will need smooth edges to avoid scratching the tubing, especially during replacement.

The air regulator fitting at the laser head was in good shape and reused as is.

While we were at it, Seth cleaned the gantry rails and retreated with white lithium grease.

The entire task took about 2 hours.

BEFORE Repair

AFTER Repair

Hockey Stencil

This will be my most complex sports design to date because of the numerous details of the ice rink which I will reproduce almost 100% in full. I needed to expand the inner ellipse to allow for the extra detail not being too small.

There are 20 layers in total though some of them are just a straight cut.

The design can be in a vertical or horizontal orientation by simply rotating the sticks and the masks by 90 degrees.

I now keep a table of objects/layer name/layer color so that I do not accidentally assign the same color to two different objects/groups of objects.

An RDWorks simulation gives a run time of 11 minutes and 50% laser light on time.

University of Virginia Basketball Champions 2019!

This is my salute to the Men's basketball team for winning the National Championship.

Shown here is the Sketch book page where I planned out what colors to use and the details of how the various cut-outs from the stencil would either be filled in or left blank.

I used 9 different pens, including two blues and two oranges.

TT = Texas Tech
V = Virginia

and the final score 85-77 in overtime. For the letters and numbers I used standard commercially available stencils. The silver objects are TV Cameras.

Go Hoos!

The nets and ball seams were free-hand drawn.

Basketball Stencil cut 

with 4 inch focal length laser

The laser power is still good but I did need to increase the percentage by 5-15% compared to the football themed stencil cut earlier this summer. There was a bit more haze on the outer cut edges too, however, by using clever placements of blades and backing tape, the usual stuck on white debris was almost non-existent. Unlike previous design cut jobs, I skipped my usual laser alignment and beam quality check.

For the first time, I avoided use of the exacto blade to cut my 10 inch by 12 inch plexiglass template rectangle. I decided to just make an RDWorks g-code file for that rectangle and let the laser cut it for me instead! While I had the file loaded in memory, I went ahead and cut several more until I exhausted my available space on the sheet purchased from Lowe's. This is a big time saver and avoids tedious manual labor.

It took 38 seconds to cut the rectangle. It took 4 minutes and 5 seconds to cut the full basketball design into the rectangle.

I suffered through a bit of confusion regarding how the on-board system differentiates the origin from the framing outline. Normally I set my design origin to be the upper right corner. I was working on a different computer that had the default changed to the design origin being dead center (the prior user likely was using a circularly symmetric design). Therefore, when I tried to use the on-board framing button on the laser, I got a "X Slop Over" error, which means that you are asking the laser head to position itself outside the bed boundaries. All I had to do was go back to RDWorks, reset the design origin to upper right, resave the Ufile and then all worked as normal with the on-board origin and the framing start point as one and the same. See my Blogsite section titled RDWorks for more details on this issue.

As a courtesy I am now deleting my uploaded g-code files from system memory after I finish the cut job. The on-board memory can only hold 99 files.

8.8 inches by 6.2 inches for the largest ellipse.

Usable stencil components

Cut out pieces

Smooth clean small cuts can be achieved with proper laser settings

I purposely tried a cut line close to tangential to the circle to see how tight the cut line would be. The circle held its own.

All the components in concentric positions and backing tape removed.

Basketball theme stencil

 

Today I needed about 3 1/2 hours to start from scratch to complete this Stencil design in VCarve Pro.

First, I created a 3 vertical oriented concentric ellipses template so that I can quickly use to build stencils down the road based on that layout. Remember, by keeping the ellipse sizes the same across designs, I can later mix and match for new patterns, without any new software design work or laser cutting.

The yellow objects are cameras and the light blue objects are uniform tank tops. The olive green objects at top/bottom are hoops with backboard connectors also drawn in. I made good use of the weld and intersect tools for those.

Learned several new tricks for VCarve Pro; see my VCarve Pro section of this blogsite for details.