by Adwoa Asare

Laser Cutter & 2D CAD

The goal of this lab was to make a press-fit kit out of cardboard. The pieces for the pressfit kit were designed in Autodesk Fusinon 360 which can be downloaded here for free.

For those new to this process, instructions for how to use fusion 360 and the laser cutter can be found on the course website.

Press-Fit Kit

For my press fit kit I made the following the following sketch staring with the circle (40 cm diameter) and adding 4 construction lines through the center to the edges. i then made an offset from each of the lines(2.3 cm) and mirrored the off the offset lines. Once this was complete, I projected the parts of the sketch that I wanted to keep for cutting by 4 cm and turned the face of the now 3D image into my DXF file which you can access below.

2Dsketch 3Dsketch CLICK to download my DXF file

After my DXF file was saved onto a USB drive i inserted the USB into the laser printer and followed standard procedure to use it. I cut out four pieces for my press fit kit as shown below.

cutPieces removedPieces construction

Laser Cutting

Here you can see a video of the laser cutter in action on the setting shown below. It is filling in a rectangular shape and due to the spacing setting there are visible gaps between each stroke of the laser.

LCsettings