Assignment 8
Laser Cutting
This week, we were required to use the laser cutter in the Makerspcae to laser cut a pressfit kit.
Prerequisites
The Makerspace in IIT Delhi houses a Epilog laser Fusion m2 laser cutter which is a CO2 laser cutter. It is good for engravig most of the surfaces. However, it's not suited for cutting metals and other heavy/dense materials. We use this laser cutter to cut and engrave wood, cardboard, acrylic, MDF and other light materials
CorelDraw
CorelDraw is a vector graphics editor. For laser cutting we use corel draw as a drawing making tool. The graphics file can be transferred to the laser cutter and the machine will engrave or cut as per the drawing.
Making the drawing
As part of our project we made the press fit kit for our cart.
Below are the steps followed
- Open Corel Draw, and set the page reference point as top left corner
- Import the file which is to be cut.
- The part which is to be cut is to be made as 'Hairline' (which is vector graphics) and the remaining part will be considered as raster graphics by the printer. So here the outline is made as 'Hairline' in line settings.
- Give print command.
- Verify 'Both combined(vector and raster)' option is checked.
- Adjust the speed and power settings according to the material selected based on optmization. The speed setting used for 6 mm thick MDF here is '8' and power setting used is '50'.
- Give the print job.
- On printer control panel the job will be listed. Click on 'Go' to continue with printing.
Laser cutting
Below are the screenshots of the process with steps
The video of the laser cutting is in the 2nd presentation of the final project