A colleague/friend of mine got her first solo apartment was lamenting that she was needed a bunch of household necessities, including a napkin holder. Since she hadn’t been in a while, I suggested suggested she could make her own at Nova Labs. Annoyed, she told me to make her one; I thought the best gift was one she’d regret asking for…
The first thoughts included some messy clipart faces (think Garbage Pail Kids stickers), but I quickly settled on some nice type and alliteration.
The design. Font is Avenir Next Ultra Light
Edge view of the napkin holder
The design for the napkin holder itself was whipped up in Illustrator using a simple tabbed box type design.
Production happened using the laser cutter at Nova Labs.
Cutting the first napkin holder on Mongo, Nova Labs’ 100w CO2 laser cutter.
Before pulling the parts out of the laser cutter.
Parts after a light sanding on the downdraft sanding table.
A less vulgar version was created for a neighbor who commented on Facebook that they wanted one, but would have to wait 10 years before their kids could be exposed to the original!
My daughter had asked about making a plane at “your workshop” (aka Nova Labs) and I thought I’d test one method before I brought her along.
This Boeing 747 model started from a vector 3-view drawing I found online. I cleaned it up in Illustrator and prepared cutouts for 5mm wood.
Cut on the laser cutter at Nova Labs.
Definitely less than an hour start to finish.
I think the next try will be to make something a little more 3d by layering pieces of material (I can then get the relative position of the wings and horizontal stabilizer in the right place).
Remixed 747 from a reader
In November of 2020, I got an email from Chris asking if I had the file for this, as he wanted to turn into into Christmas tree ornaments for people at his company in the aviation industry. I sent it over to him.
He ended up remixing it a bit and making the following for his team (logos blurred at his request).
Remixed 747 model, turned into Christmas ornament gifts for Chris’s company.
Every kid needs a sign on his or her door, and while they are little, might as well make it cute (since there will be “Parents, Stay Out!” signs soon enough).
These are actually the second round of room signs – at our old place, and with one kid, we made a similar sign with the same decals. But now with two kids, I decided to make two brand new copies…
A scan of the dragon fly wallpaper decals was traced in Illustrator and each shape was incorporated into the background. Text was added, naturally. Check out a PDF of the file here: Room_signs
Cutting was performed on the laser cutter at Nova Labs, out of 1/8″ hard board.
I primed the pieces with white spray paint, and mom did the painting (including glitter spray paint) with some “help.” 🙂
Scan of the dragonfly wallpaper decals, later used to trace the shape and incorporate into the sign.
We have a set of IKEA drawers in our basement with all of our wrapping paper and gift bag type stuff. On the wall above it was a pegboard that we have have hung all of the scissors, tape, etc.
My wife used hooks to hold dowels for rolls of ribbon, but they didn’t extend far enough from the pegboard (given the diameter of the rolls at least) so the hooks would often fall down when you pulled on the ribbon.
I whipped up these dowel holders in Illustrator to securely hold two 3/8″ dowels far enough from the pegboard to accommodate the ribbon.
Small tabbed feet keep the holder from falling over, and small holes were included to thread zip-ties through to attach it to the wall.
They were cut from scrap lite plywood at NovaLabs on their 100w laser cutter.
Overall, it is working great! Check out a vectored PDF here: Ribbon holder.
A week and a half ago, I created a slotted together Christmas Tree decoration as a test. My older daughter saw it and asked if she could decorate it, but I couldn’t let her as I needed it for work. Given how easy it was to create, I went ahead and made her several more to color.
These were laser cut out of not-quite 1/8″ lite plywood. The Christmas Trees are 6″ tall, and the Snowflakes are 4″ tall. The flat ones were jammed into the open spaces on the sheet of wood so I didn’t waste as much material.
The items were downloaded from Shutterstock as they had several vector graphics containing multiple Christmas Trees, so I’d only need to buy one image. Same with the snowflakes. I looked for ones with simple, symmetrical designs.
If you want to make these, here are the steps (it’s really simple):
Size the tree to whatever you want in Illustrator, Inkscape, whatever…
Measure the thickness of your material.
Make a rectangle that is half the height of your tree, and where the width is the thickness of your material (in my case, 3″ x .11″).
Center align the tree and rectangle.
Duplicate the pair of items.
On one, ‘bottom align’ the tree and rectangle. On the other, ‘top align’ the items.
Use the pathfinder options to remove the rectangle from the tree, and you’re done.
At this point I’ve created a few laser-cut tabbed boxes (trading card box, boxes for custom puzzles, and another as an electronics enclosure). None of these had an attached lid, but since this particular project was a gift for the 2-year-old daughter of a colleague, I thought that was the way to go.
I took measurements for a package of crayons that was part of her birthday present, and added in the thickness of the .11″ (really, it couldn’t be a full 1/8″?) lite plywood I had. The box maker web application by Rahul at ConnectionLab has been my go-to for these, but, I found that the pieces generated for this particular box had weird corners. I tried using another box maker found at MakerCase and it worked pretty well.
The pieces were symmetrical so it made it a little easier to work with, at the expense of the center tabs having irregular measurements compared to the others.
I took steps to smooth out the top edges of the pieces, and eliminated the tabs from the lid. Pins for the hinge were added, and I created a hole for the pin to go into. The biggest problem was that I initially made the center line of the hole above the part, so the lid didn’t sit flush with the box. I modified the file slightly dropping the hole down, and recut the 2 parts. At least those 2 pieces were pretty small so it wasn’t a huge deal.
Since most little kid birthday parties we’ve been to lately don’t include opening presents, and I haven’t been back at work yet, I don’t know how it was received. Hopefully she loved her name being engraved on the lid!
Ella and a small bird engraved on the lid of a custom laser-cut tabbed box.
A custom laser-cut tabbed box for crayons.
Ella and a small bird engraved on the lid of a custom laser-cut tabbed box.
Assembled prototype of a desktop Christmas Tree decoration.
It looks like this is the second post in a row with work themed projects (you just don’t see all my draft posts!) Anyway…
Last year my team gave our internal clients Christmas cards to say thank you for working with us over the year. I thought we could step it up a bit with a company-themed gift/decoration to go on their desks this December.
This is a prototype of a laser cut, slotted Christmas Tree decoration. Made of 1/8″ birch plywood, I created the design in Illustrator. The shape is intentionally simple as we are going to cut or engrave some of our graphic resources on the final pieces. My wife is advocating for red acrylic, so we’ll see what happens after we discuss at work.
Stay tuned for the final version in the next 2 weeks or so.
2 flat pieces that will slot together to make a Christmas tree decoration. This is just a prototype made of 1/8″ plywood.
We have gotten into the near habit of visiting some friends the weekend after Labor Day, and this year I wanted to bring a cool hostess gift. Also visiting that weekend is another friend who has made wonderful baby blankets for both of our girls, and I wanted to give her something special as a thank you.
For my quilting friend, I had wanted to make her a squirrel-something for a while, due to her personal vendetta against them (something to do with a nest of them eating part of her house). Our other friends have long-hair dachshunds (no vendettas, but they don’t get along with our dog too well), so I thought to make them something with dogs.
Enter the puzzle.
I made a chunky wood puzzle a while ago to be suitable for children, but I wanted to try more intricate shapes with easier to laser-cut 1/4” plywood.
I bought dog and squirrel artwork so I could focus on the puzzle aspect… using Illustrator I hand drew all of the puzzle lines for each one, and tried to loosely inject some detail into what would otherwise be just a silhouette.
My take aways and tips for this project were:
Make the outline of the puzzle as a separate object that is cut last.
Keep piece lines as long as possible, and don’t divide them at intersections.
Use a honeycomb bed so pieces don’t fall down into the laser path and get damaged
I used the blade bed thinking that I’d reduce char marks on the bottom of the pieces, but in reality I got fairly pronounced smoke staining anyway. Also, I had to pause the laser to tape pieces together as they were cut. Not wanting to push too hard led to the masking tape not making full-contact and leaving its own discoloration… But at least nothing fell through the slats and got damaged.
The pieces are big enough that I should have protected the wood with masking or transfer tape from the beginning.
The boxes:
These were my first tabbed-boxes… I used the box-maker website found at http://boxmaker.rahulbotics.com/ to give me my files, which I modified to smooth out the top edge. I also created a lip that would assemble inside the top of the lid so it wouldn’t jiggle around…
The file from the website was easy to work with, just needing to ‘join segments’ in Nova Labs’ laser program.
After I made the first box I realized it was way bigger than necessary. But, it was easy to shorten each of the side pieces by deleting a pair of notches.
Assembly with .004” cut width settings was good (I probably could have gone .006” to get it tighter) and thin CA was enough to hold it all together.
My last note is that these puzzles are pretty tricky; the uniform color top and bottom doesn’t make it easy for you to know what side is up!
It is the beginning of September and Christmas creep is in full swing. Craft stores already seem to have supplies out for all of the major 4th quarter holidays – I guess crafters like to plan ahead and be prepared?
Not me – I had just completed my laser cutter safety course at Nova Labs, and this was actually my first project just 2 weeks prior to Christmas, 2013.
Here are the details:
Material is 1/2″ thick oak, which was very slow to cut and had a lot of charring.
We actually liked the contrast of the blackened edge to the lighter wood and didn’t bother sanding these at all.
Art was created in Illustrator, from a mix of sources:
Reindeer was a simplified tracing of a small figurine we purchased in Copenhagen in 2009.
Snowman was more-or-less made from scratch.
The snowflake took inspiration from other vector snowflakes online.
Tree was straight from a Shutterstock vector library of Christmas trees
The ornament was a slightly modified Shutterstock file.
The base was designed with a notch to match the thickness of the wood hook.
Despite not really accounting for the laser kerf, it pressure fits in and doesn’t need glue or other fasteners to stay put.
Overall my first project went very well, with no problems that I can remember. We loved that these matched our style much better than anything we found online. I guess that’s the entire point of making.
