Lasercutting from hell

I’d like to have an so called “Alien Cube” as a lamp hanging from my ceiling. And on Thingiverse there is a template for lasercutting one. Link: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1805216

But the template is for 10x10x10cm and i want it BIIIIG! My version should be 38cm side length. This Box should then be illuminated by LED stripes and LED-powered light strings. A nice idea. So i redsigned the whole thing added some roundings to the 90Β° lines and made my template “Kangaroo style” πŸ™‚

Lastly i cut some poplar plywood with a thickness of 3mm. And it took 5 rounds for the lasercutter to get through the material. And as described on Mr. Beam’s Homepage this lasercutter can cut poplar up to a thickness of 4mm and birch multiplex up to 3mm. So i thought: This will be a fast and nice project with the more stable birch wood. I was so wrong.

My lasercutter is cutting that bloody birch multiplex 3mm plate sind 25 hours now πŸ™‚ Its the 35 time the laser is going around and around and around πŸ™‚ I am cutting 10 Hours a day and it seems that 10 hours are similar to 1mm of cutted wood. I hate birch so very much, i ordered a bunch of poplar hoping those plates will arrive soon πŸ™‚

Damn. It takes hours and hours and hours.

But i want to know how birch multiplex 3mm is cutted, so i stay patient. Normally i demo-cut a few circles on a new material to check how many rounds a cut-through will take. But i forgot this totally. So now i have to wait until i can be sure everything is cutted through. After each cutting-session i open the lid and try to move the cutted pieces but thes still stay in place. Hopefully this gets to an end on the weekend πŸ™‚

After that i will proceed the cut tests with a circle of 1cm and different speeds and power-settings, so i can provide the best setup for cutting birch multiplex with 3mm thickness.

Re-activated my Mr. Beam II casercutter

I’ve pledged the Mr. Beam II Lasercutter a few years ago as it was on Kickstarter in 2016 and got the lasercutter Mr. Beam II together with the air filter system a long time after the planned deliverance.

As i lost interest in this item it took a while until i unpacked the parcels and i tried a few cuts with sample graphics. Worked well, but i totally forget ovber the time, why i have wanted a lasercutter so much that i invested a few thoudsand dollars to get one πŸ™‚ And so the Mr. Beam II stood in my old office and got older and older.

Now, a few days ago i’ve planned to set up my office new and make some kind of nerd-dungeon out of this area. So i planned to pin my logo at the wall and thought about how cool this would be to have it backlit with RGB.LED-stripes. SO i overworked my logo and sent my file to an online-printing-company which is printing and contour milling the logo on a 3mm DiBond-plate. But to mount it on the wall i needed a surface to mount the LED strips and the logo-plate itself. So i came up with the idea of lasercutting those suerfaces out of some poplar plywood.

I have had 3mm poplar plywood in my cellar since a few years and some Ponal wood glue. So i started cutting and to get 10mm stripes fit onto the base i needed to cut 4x3mm boards. Worked fine. Took about 40 minutes for each board and after i glued them together i have to wait for the Philips Hue-compatible LED-Stripes so i can control them by script or my Stream Deck-Setup.

The Mr. Beam II Lasercutter – First time i did something productive with it πŸ™‚

So all boards are cut and glued together and are drying at the moment. It worked very easy to do the vector paths in Adobe Illustrator export them as SVG and import them into the Mr. Beam II Software. It took a while until the Mr. Beam II has updated his software. And a lot of error accured but rebooting and re-checking for updates and installing them “as they wanted to” helped and half an hour later (after opening a support ticket at Mr. Beam) and some new reboots it worked and the software was updated as wanted and went from beta-version to a official version.

The basement for the DiBond-print and the LED-Stripes

So i hopefully get my prints during this week and correctly milled πŸ™‚ and then my wall in my new nerd-dungeon shall be set up with my logo (without text) and should be light up by a hue compatible led-rgb-stripe.

As i ordered two boards from the print shop (one for the nerd-dungeon, one for my music studio) i may need to cut another four plates for the basement. but now i have optimized the cutout process for the Mr. Beam II lasercutter so it takes less time than the first set.

Best Setup for cutting 3mm poplar plywood with the Mr. Beam II

I’ve tried a few cuts on a 3mm poplar plywood circle and my setup was:

  • 250mm / second, 100% intensity

i’ve cutted seven circles and every cirly with a higher number of rounds.

First Circle: 1 round, 2nd Circle: 2 rounds and so on.

The first total cut-thrugh was at

  • 5 rounds with 250mm/sec and 100% energy.

So this is my optimal setting for cutting out 3mm poplar plywood with the Mr. Beam II lasercutter.

Next i will try faster speeds to optimize cutting time .