Laser Cutting

Workshop Laser Cutting 72

On the journey through our workshops to learn new and fascinating ways of working within our field we had a workshop learning about laser cutting. With this workshop we got an induction on how to use both the machines that are available to us on the campus, what to do and not to do and how to book them to use for our own projects. What I quickly came to realise is that laser cutting is very straight forward if you remember all the tiny details that can either make or break your outcome. After a safety and machine induction we started cutting out small business card sized name cards. This experience really opened my eyes for what can be achieved with a laser cutter. I don’t know if it will be relevant for any future projects, but maybe I will do some fun art pieces in my own time.

Workshop Laser Cutting 74

As far as research goes for this workshop it was mostly primary research. Seen as I was most likely just going to use this for the embossing plate for print making, I didn’t go to deep into the field and how it looks today. However, when being there with my classmate Lucy, we did experiment with the settings to get the ideal raster engraving settings. We did this by doing tiny test squares on the wood we were going to cut in. Simply by taking a small area of 2cm x 2cm and writing the word “TEST” you could get a good feel of how deep the current setting would cut. Something I noticed from the induction was that the laser makes some orange sparks as it is cutting the wood. Recently having the RAW Photography workshop, I was intrigued to try and get some interesting high-speed pictures of the sparks. So, for the day of the laser cutting I brought with me my DLSR. I was not disappointed with the result I ended up with.

Lucy Frankland 2nd Year Graphics

Workshop Laser Cutting 76

Outcome

For the outcome we were making a plate with our initials. We were going to use the same plate in the print making workshop that we had later that week. Me and Lucy had misunderstood the brief because, we thought that we were supposed to engrave the wood, but apparently what almost everyone else did was cut their letters out and then glue them back on a clean plate. Either way the engraving turned out nicely and worked fine for the embossing. If anything, we learned that engraving a A5 size piece of wood takes a long time. We booked the laser cutter for 2 hours and still was a bit overtime by the end of it all.