For Dad’s birthday, I spent time drawing a picture of his tractor. It might take a lot of hours to get to the point where you have your file ready to cut, but after you get there, it’s just minutes to cut a new copy.
I decided to cut out a big one and put it on Elijah’s wall. The max work piece size that our laser cutter can handle is 24 x 18 so that’s about how big this one is. I sprayed on a couple coats of white paint but still let the wood grain show through. As you can see in the picture, he was VERY excited to put this on his wall.
I’m very thankful that I can use a laser cutter at work, but what are the options for laser cutting at home? There are three very easy and low cost options to start with:
Check with your local library. More and more libraries are supplying laser cutters and 3D printers for people to use.
Order it from a website. I’ve done this for 3D prints before but the same concept applies to laser cutting. The turnaround time is slower and you pay for shipping, but it’s a lot cheaper than buying a machine!
Find a local maker space. These are generally clubs that you can join and use their equipment. You pay a membership fee or you pay to rent time on a machine, but doing it this way helps you iterate faster than doing it by mail.
If you still want to buy one for home use, you should probably be getting advice from someone more knowledgeable than me, but here’s what I know. If you buy an entry level system from a company like Epilog or Universal, expect to pay upwards of $8000, and that might not include ventilation which is almost a requirement.
A company called Glowforge is making a lot of waves in the maker community because they are coming to market with a laser cutter intended for home hobby use. It has a lot of really nice features that lower the barrier to entry, and you can get their basic model with ventilation for under $4000. Reviews of pre-production units are very positive. The cost of ongoing maintenance remains to be seen.
I’ve written before about making a crosscut sled for the table saw. I used the first one so much that it kind of wore out and I had ideas for improvements so I made another. They’re incredibly convenient especially for the smaller toy projects that I was doing. It’s a very safe and precise way to cut small pieces (among other things.)
My new table saw had miter slots that were a different width so I needed to build another sled. This time I incorporated some t-track and a flip stop that slides in that track. This allows me to get repeatable cuts with the stop but I can also flip it up after I set the position of the piece to avoid any binding between the blade and the stop.
The process was pretty much the same as previous builds, but because I had a much more precise saw, I decided to spend extra time squaring up the fence to get perfect 90 degree cuts.
I used my big square to get it initially set close to 90 and then did the 5 cut test to see how far off I was. Watch that link to see it in action, but basically you make a cut, rotate the piece, make a cut, rotate, etc. You do that 5 times and then you measure the width of the last slice at the top and the bottom. That helps you calculate how much out of square your sled is because it really magnifies the error. I was so far off that it was plainly visible to the naked eye. How could that be when my square said I was spot on? I futzed with it for quite a while and then got frustrated and walked away. During my break, I realized that the only explanation was that my square wasn’t square. Indeed it wasn’t! So I changed up my method of dialing it in and got it to a point where over a 40″ cut, I only deviate by 0.001″ from being perfectly square. That’s insanely perfect. In fact, it’s so good that I suspect I’m within the margin of error for my setup and my measuring tools. Plenty good enough for me.
Yesterday was Dad and Mom’s 40th anniversary! Congratulations! They’ve been supportive as parents and been a great example of a loving marriage for us to follow.
It feels a little silly to give someone a hunk of wood as a gift after forty years of effort, but that’s what I did. I took one of the pictures from their honeymoon in Jamaica and transferred it onto a piece of pine. To do the transfer, I took a sheet of blank address labels that you run through your printer and I peeled off all the labels so I was left with the waxy surface. I printed with my inkjet printer right onto that waxy surface and then carefully pressed it onto the wood. Through trial and error I learned that you really need to give it a good rub to transfer the ink. Steve Ramsey has a good video about this process. If you’re smarter than me, you’ll remember to flip the image in your photo editing software before doing this.
I finished it off with a couple coats of spray lacquer to protect it a little and then made a support so it would stand up kind of like a photo frame.
I made my first 3D prints! I have relatively easy (but limited) access to a 3D printer at work so I decided to fire off a few prints. The first thing I made was a train samples from the 3D Builder app in Windows 10. It came out great and now sits in Elijah’s pile of toys. I also printed off a custom piece that connects my random orbit sander to my shop vac. That model came off of thingiverse.com. I haven’t gone so far as to design any of my own models yet, but it’s still fun to play with.
I liked the way the Plasti Dip looked on the back of my truck so I decided to do it on the F150 logos on the sides too. It was a quick job and I actually was able to do it in the garage. My truck barely fits in with the mirrors folded and there’s a small chance that if I was creative I could even close the garage door.
The other small tweak I made was to my antenna. It stuck up probably 8-10 inches above the top of the truck. I like the idea of it hitting a garage roof to give me warning, but that’s way too much warning. Since I regularly park in garages at work, it was pretty annoying. The solution? Cut it shorter. There’s really nothing too fancy about it. Antennas just unscrew and then you can cut them with a hacksaw. I tried to use some JB Weld to put the ball back on top of the antenna, but I couldn’t get it to stick on solidly so I just left it off. Who cares? I suppose I damaged my radio reception a little, but I almost never use the radio and it worked fine even with the antenna completely unscrewed.
Chris and Nikki replaced the fridge in their house when they moved in so they were looking to get rid of the one that was in the house. (They already had another fridge in their garage.) This was right after I had gotten the truck so picking up their fridge seemed like a good excuse to take a drive.
It has been sitting in our garage unplugged since then, but now that I’ve got the garage more arranged, it was time to find a home for the fridge. I tore down the shelves and coat rack that I had built near the door. That was one of the first projects I built after moving into this house. It was done with a miter saw, circular saw and a drill. You don’t need much to get started building stuff!
The fridge went up against that wall and I decided to build two vertical shelves to go on each side. They’re pretty simple construction. I used 3/4″ plywood and used my router with a straight edge and a 3/4″ bit to cut dadoes to hold the shelves. I cut the dadoes before cutting the board into two pieces for each side of hte shelves. That guaranteed that the shelves would be perfectly flat. After that I glued everything together and nailed it in place. They aren’t fancy but they should work well. The next step will be building cabinets to go along the wall above the fridge.
My parents have been building a fantastic new garage at their house. I thought it would look good with a new sign in it. I found some inspiration online, drew it in Inkscape and then took it to the laser cutter at work. The sign is made out of two sheets of 1/4″ MDF. The bottom is just a circle and the top has all the shapes cut out of it. I also cut the white portions out of 1/8″ plywood and put that under each of the white pieces. That gave it a raised look which I really like. After I got it all done, I realized I probably should have put “Martens Garage” instead of just my Dad’s name because Mom uses it for her project too but, oh well. Maybe I’ll have to come up with something else that has Mom’s name on it.
I bought a router table a while back but I’ve never had a good place to use it. I kept it along the wall in the garage and when I wanted to use it, I had to drag it out and either use it on the floor or put it on a folding table. It was worth it for big projects but for small things I often skipped it. Now that I have more space in the shop area, I decided to build a cart to give the router a more permanent home and give me some additional storage space. It’s just a simple cabinet on wheels with two drawers but I’m excited to have it completed, and it was wonderful to just drive to Home Depot and throw a couple sheets of plywood in the truck!
I finally got around to watching The LEGO Movie. It’s… awesome! Everything is awesome! The cast reads like a list of my favorite actors: Will Arnett, Alison Brie, Charlie Day, Will Ferrell, Will Forte, Morgan Freeman, and Nick Offerman and Chris Pratt. The kid in me loved the story and the geek in me loved the awesome computer graphics.
Long time followers of my nerd adventures may remember that I’ve made a few movies of my own. I finally uploaded them to YouTube for your amusement.
Up first is a stop motion video made with cousins Tim, Mark and Ryan. It was probably during Christmas and I’d guess it was around 1987 or 88. We did it in Tim’s basement with his VHS camcorder. There was a feature that would record a few frames with the press of a button. When we had the idea, I remember talking about who was going to build each piece. Before Mark went back to his house to build everything, we typed in a bunch of reminders on his awesome Casio calculator watch. The video took forever and we had a “script” change at the end. As a Lego man was moving across the crosswalk, he fell down perfectly in the middle of one of the recording clips. We went with it (what else can you do?) and turned it into a medical emergency. It’s a riveting story. I sped up the video below so that you can get your boredom in a shorter amount of time.
I thought this project was incredibly cool so a couple years later, I decided to try it again on my own. I borrowed our neighbor’s VHS-C camcorder (so “tiny”!) and set up a table in our basement. The city I built was much simpler than the first one and the story was non-existant.
And last, but certainly not least, I fell down a rabbit hole in college. My Junior and Senior year and then part of the year after graduation were spent doing a Lego movie on the computer. This was about 2000-2002 so there were none of the fancy Lego CAD programs available. Instead, I painstakingly built up a library of Lego pieces in a program called POVRay. It was a free tool that did raytracing but the modeling was all done in text. So to build a piece, I’d start with a rectangle, add some height and draw the nubs on top. I even had versions of the pieces with the word LEGO writen on top of each nub. Something like a Lego person is a huge amount of code. I had posted it to the web a while back and found it on archive.org. This link shows you what it takes to draw a single Lego character. Before I got too deep into the project, I built a short little sample video based on the old Budweiser Wazabi commercial.
The pieces were incredibly detailed and it literally took years to build it all. I also wrote a bunch of crazy math functions to animate the camera movement through the virtual world and also to animate things like walking characters. Rememember that since it is all text based input, “walking” means manually adjusting the rotation of various geometric shapes while translating the whole object forward. It was crazy complicated, but obviously I really enjoyed it for whatever reason. It was kind of relaxing to sit down for a while every night and “build” more pieces from scratch and at a time when I had very little money, it was fun to have limitless amounts of Legos to play with.
After spending eons on the graphics, I put about 30 seconds of thought into the story and here’s the result:
It’s not too far-fetched to say that this project got me my job at Microsoft. It took about 11 minutes to render a single frame of the movie (on my P2 350Mhz computer) and there were 2538 frames. That comes out to about 20 days of non-stop computing power. But oh yeah, don’t forget that I screw up a lot so I had to redo a bunch of it. To get it all done more quickly and to enter a programming contest at Purdue, I wrote a distributed rendering program. POVRay could be controlled via the command line so you would install POVRay and my client app on your computer. A central server would hand out individual frames for all the clients to render and then the client would send back the final image. (Archive.org has a copy of the design document for this project.) It actually worked and saved me a bunch of time. Not only that, I won the programming contest which netted me an original XBox and an HP Jornada PocketPC. But better yet, the guy who ran that comptetition went on to work at Microsoft. When I was looking for a job, JimM helped me reconnect with him and I ended up working in his team for the next six years!
So yes, this Lego project was ridiculously complex and within a few months of me releasing that video, there were bigger and better Lego rendering tools available. But I do think that finding fun projects like this area great way to stretch your abilities and feed your passion. This single project helped me in a lot of interviews when I was exiting college and it taught me a lot about programming.
For Dad’s birthday, I spent time drawing a picture of his tractor. It might take a lot of hours to get to the point where you have your file ready to cut, but after you get there, it’s just minutes to cut a new copy.
