Gillian Anderson - Laser Engraved Coasters

My friend and Dragons Keep clubmate Kat is a Gilliam Anderson superfan.  This makes it incredibly easy to make super special custom gifts for her birthday.

Laser Engraved Gillian Anderson Coasters

On a recent Aliexpress buying spree I bought a pack of 72 plywood blanks for the princely sum of £7.20 so that's 10p each.  Measuring 73mm square and 2.3mm thick with rounded corners, they are a perfect size for a custom coaster project.  I decided to break the project up into a border and an image so I could take advantage of the speed of an .svg file for the outlines and the variable laser power that comes with a rasterized image.

The Border

This is my first really successful project designing something in Inkscape specifically for the laser engraver and LaserGRBL.  The border file was engraved at 20% power and 200mm/minute and each coaster took a little over 3 minutes to engrave.

The Pictures

I assembled a series of 6 images from the internet covering some of Gillian's most famous roles and prepared these in GIMP ensuring that they were scaled to exactly 63mm square.  Trial and error ensured that when I imported these images into LaserGRBL I had the necessary 6mm x/y offset to ensure that they were centered inside the engraved square.

These images were then imported as 1 bit Dithered B/W at 15 lines per mm and the engrave settings were 20% power at 500 mm/minute.  This meant each coaster took between 30 and 100 minutes depending on the amount of black space in the image.   

I could probably have engraved these much faster but I'm still learning how to engrave and I don't mind it taking a little longer rather than having to run multiple passes. 

Gillian Anderson truly is a chameleon of an actress.

Bonus Cats

I also added a bonus portrait of each of Kat's two Cats, Bonnie and Clyde for good measure.  

Boardgame Badge Burn Ballsup

My friend Stephen (Table Tok Games) is making the pilgrimage to UK Games Expo in Birmingham this year and will be running demos of some of the upcoming releases from Hachette Boardgames. 

He asked me if I could make some badges for the event. I thought that this would be a great way to learn how to use my new Laser Cutter Engraver.

Stephen created a design in two parts, an etch file with his meeple logo and a cut file with a series of 30mm circles which would be the badge.  Registration marks in two opposite corners made sure that Illustrator would not trim the images to just the internal drawing.

LaserGRBL

I am currently using LaserGRBL which has support for SVG from inkscape but this is an experimental feature so the files were exported as PNG.

The Cut File 

The cut file was uploaded into LaserGRBL and I used the centreline option to vectorize a cut path.  This was slightly problematic in that the on the very top and bottom row of circles the line hit the edge of the page and vectorizing broke the cut path.  

Pardon the pun, but there is definitely a learning curve when creating files for the laser cutter.  The next attempt will have some whitespace between the design and the registration marks.

I imported this at 120mm/min and a laser power of 95%

The Etch file

Importing the etch file I opted to go for the Line to Line Tracing option at a speed of 500mm/min and a laser power of 95%

The Material

I had some scrap MDF sheet left over from some DIY project.  This measured 2.8mm thick and I mounted it on my workspace with Duck Double Sided Tape (Boy this stuff is sticky) 

Laser Engraving

I was reasonably pleased with the engraving which took just over 20 minutes with one pass.  I initially tried 1000mm/min but the laser threw an error about two thirds of the way through and it would not recommence.  I think that it must have run into a buffer problem or the speed was too high.  I have not done any testing on speeds as yet so this may be part of my learning curve. 

The only downside with the Line to Line Trace option is that it prints like a conventional printer and you get jaggy curves (there's no anti-aliasing as far as I can tell)

Laser Cutting

This is where I fall down, hard.  With any new technology or tool you just have to learn what works and what doesn't.  I have no idea if I am using the software correctly, if my laser is focused correctly, how many passes I should be making, should I be using Air Assist, if my material is at fault or even if I am expecting too much.  There are so many variables.

After 4 passes and 160 minutes of cutting I gave up in frustration.

Resin 3D Printer to the Rescue 

This job still needed to be completed as delivery is scheduled for the following day.  45 minutes later these bad boys came off the Photon Mono 4K.

Roleplay-Geek Gets a New Robot

Well payday came and went and not long after a new tool arrived in my workshop.

A Cheap Laser Cutter / Engraver

There are just some jobs when you need a tool like this (or have lots of skill and patience).  That one job was making a custom enclosure for a secret project I have yet to reveal out of acrylic sheet.  

I'm reasonably handy, but when it comes to transparent sheet materials, you have to be super careful otherwise you will end up scratching or gouging the delicate finish.

I bought this one off ebay and it needed to be able to do a few things

• Cut A4 sheets - my stock is A4 (210 x 297 mm) so having a largish envelope was key.
• Cut Plexiglass - a little bit of research showed that a 5W Laser should be capable of this
  

The one I ended up buying from eBay was the:

5.5W Actual Output Laser Engraver Machine For DIY Engraving Cutting 40x40cm   

Assembly

This was my first experience assembling Aluminium extrusion and frankly I am gobsmacked at the ingenuity of this stuff.  It seriously is the Lego of mechanical engineering.  The instructions were pretty clear although they could have done with a bit better photos showing the orientation of the relevant parts.  

As long as you are pretty good with IKEA furniture this will be a relatively stress-free exercise and the total build time was less than one hour.

My only issue came with the routing of the cables and the complete lack of instructions regarding zip ties and cable management.  They have pretty much thought of everything though and as long as you follow the labels on each connector it is pretty logical where everything goes.  After all, we aren't wiring a 1974 RA 21 Toyota Celica with a 2005 2UZ V8 from a Tundra (Seriously if you aren't watching Sarah-n-Tuned what are you doing with your life). 

Software Installation

The nice eBay seller sent me a message with a QR code for the software download.  Installation was a breeze and after a little bit of reading of the help pages I was connected and ready to go.

Lots of Problems

I ran the cutter power test which seemed to go okay although there was a lot of burning around the edges.  After loading up a picture, I went through the basic interface and set the printer going.  Immediately I had an alarm and couldn't work out what had stopped the printer.  

After another set of tries and different images and more alarms I gave up.

2 Weeks Later...

Sometimes it is better to sleep on a thing and after 2 weeks of sleeping on it I summed up the courage to have another go.  

The first thing I wanted to do was build a baseboard to keep the cutter square and in place on my workbench.  This was quickly fashioned from a piece of white laminate hardboard.  I made little cutouts for the 4 printer feet to lock into.  

I then homed the cutter and using the "flash" button I marked the home position I then manually moved the head to the furthest X position and flashed the laser again marking this position.  Homing the printer made all sorts of noise, I guess that it doesn't like its stepper motors being back driven but unlike my 3D Printer there is no option to disable the steppers.  

I decided to use the Jog feature to send the head North along the Y axis but after about 5 or 6 Jogs it threw another alarm.  I flashed the laser and marked this point.  Connecting all the dots gave me a rudimentary XY scale and origin point about which I can set some guides snd be a little bit more confident in where my images are going to appear.

X Y Offset

It seemed like when the image uploaded into the cutter workspace it was centered on the origin and the first thing the cutter wanted to do was travel West and South beyong the cutter's Home position.

Eventually I discovered that in the import / resize dialogue there are some offset commands.  These were bizarrely set to -43 in both axis.  Resetting these to +20 in each axis and hey presto my laser moved and burned my first image... Tony Stark!

Next Projects

I really want to be able to quickly locate stock at the origin and be able to judge the offset when importing my art, so making an L-shaped scale is high on the agenda.

I also want to create a detachable shelf for the workbench as this particular model requires a laptop to be connected at all times. amd I just dont have anywhere nice to put the laptop at the moment.

Watch this space.