3d Printing and the Future of Piracy

Does anyone do laser engraving/cutting? Is there a place for that in the forum?

I'm really thinking about ordering a glowforge basic next week and wanted to make sure it's worth the money before ordering. I haven't had much luck finding active laser engraving forums.



Main interest is printing survey maps on wood & metal.

Edit: Nevermind

This is the type of stuff that convinced me

Is anyone aware of a good android app for making vector files? Something like autocad/sketchup for mobile?

That's badass.

First off, does anyone here mind if I put laser cutting/engraving stuff in here as well, or should I make a separate thread?

I just noticed that I have a referral code that'll give other people $500 off a pro / $250 off a plus / $100 off a basic model, and I get the same amount in materials if anyone uses my referral link: Bring your ideas to life. Referral Code: ZNWEWFHS

We were jotting down some ideas at home this weekend and I found some really cool examples of a "living hinge" that you can cut into wood & acrylic.


I found this cool website for creating DXF/SVG files for cutting out your own boxes with certain dimensions, so I'm going to use this as my first test when the glowforge arrives. I think that the maps are going to be tough to get working like I want them to work, so I'm going to try to get my feet under me by making some random knick knacks that I can just give to friends.



Mrs. Bandwagon is excited about making some jewelry with her coworker, so I ordered some bamboo & crushed turquoise for inlays and (tried) to get them started on Sketchup or Illustrator. I think the stack of graph paper I gave them will see more use.

Ohhhhh, Witcher 3 laser engraved map:

Attog said:

You have one of these glowforge things? How hard is it to make stuff like that? It looks beautiful.

I watched the video, that shit ain't simple.

Click to expand...

I just ordered one last week, it doesn't get here until the end of the month.

I already make 2D & 3D digital maps and I started 3D printing them about 3 years ago, but I don't like the aesthetics of the maps I can do in-house and sending them out for full color 3D prints is expensive. I haven't made my own topo map like this on a laser cutter, but I think i'll be able to figure it out fairly quick. There's an artist in town that makes huge 3D topo maps by hand and he asked me for help last year on one of his projects. I made a 25 page PDF booklet for him to put on a projector so he could see his contour lines at the appropriate interval & scaling for the size of map he was making and the thickness of the wood. He said it worked really well, and I believe it will be the same process for making files for the laser cutter. I think that the hardest part is going to be aligning the raster & vector files in the software since it's all browser based and the two formats will end up having different origins.

One thing I want to try is generating holes at the centroid of top-most closed contour line at each stack and cutting that out of every layer below it so that I can use wooden dowels to align the different elevations. It looks like everyone else is just engraving the contour lines and using that to align the next layer up. Looks tedious.

Here's a couple of my older maps/models I'll try once I get going: