Laser Cutter

  Once I decided to laser cut my business cards I made an appointment to have a tutorial on how to use it. I found out that the laser cutter is a very simple machine so you have to make sure that you put the file in correct place on the 2D software that the laser cutter can read. You then set colours to images lines and then you tell the colours what you want the laser cutter to do. The laser cutter has a few settings it can engrave, cut and fold. I will at the moment only need the cut setting but the other two settings could be something i experiment with in the future.

  Here are some tests samples we did on the day to see how the laser cutter worked. Both tests are done on 180gms paper, the brown mark is what happens when you engrave on paper it seems to just burn the area. The text has been set to cut, on this sample it you can see that due to the laser cutter cutting using a laser it has burner the paper and left it dirty and smudged, this could be a problem if cutting on white paper as it would dirty the image. On the second test we were told if you layer masking tape over where the laser is set to cut it reduced the burn on the image. As you can see this works so much better but you do have to be very careful when pealing off the tape.

Test 1

Test 2

  Testing out my files
Though I had been contacting the technician for a few weeks he had taken sudden leave due to family illness, this caused my laser cutting items to be delayed but I did manage to get a sample done but due to the thin lines they fell apart and we had to adjust the files to make them thicker.

 Because of the situation I have created a hand cut version of my business card and the card we will laser cut on Friday ready for the London book fair.