Office ‘privacy please’ sign

January 25, 2015Andrew

Our office recently converted a small room for making phone calls (given our relatively open floor plan) into a space called “The Doc”. Here you could video-chat with a doctor or RN in lieu of going to your general practitioner for basic diagnoses.

We added frosted window film to the door for privacy, but the sliding barn-doors didn’t have a lock. A double-sided sign with some velcro tabs was created to indicate if the room was occupied or not, but it wasn’t terribly attractive.

The Doc original 'privacy' sign — The original sign created to indicate if the room was occupied or not.

I was inspired by the way a porta john or airplane lav has a visible ‘occupied’ indicator. Mine would be circular to match the look of the logo for the company’s wellness program, with a cutout for some fun text to say ‘come on in’ and ‘unless you want to see my rash, stay out’ (ok, not exactly those words).

As you can see from the file below, I tried to make a complicated detent to lock the indicator at each end of its travel. In practice, there was plenty of friction between the layers of material to not require this. Also, after about 2 months of being in use, part of it broke allowing the dial to rotate past ‘Privacy please’ a little bit. I eliminated this detail on the extra four I made for our other offices.

The crescent shape was glued between the solid back circle and engraved/cut top circle.

The center axle was a push pin stuck through the back and word/dial layer, which then had the plastic part cut off with a Dremel. I had laser cut tiny circles on each of those two layers so I knew everything would line up.

The Doc artwork and pieces. — Art files used for The Doc privacy sign, and the 4 cut components. Zoom to see the over-engineered detent for locking the dial.

The Doc sign installed — The Doc privacy sign installed.

Signs for other office locations — Four signs for other offices made a few months after the prototype. The detent system was eliminated as there was enough friction to hold the sign steady.

Camera Slider Controller – Sneak Peek

January 17, 2015January 15, 2015Andrew

For several months, I’ve been working on creating a controller board for driving a stepper motor along a single-axis. AKA, a motorized camera slider!

While the overall project is over 2 years in the works at this point (it started being driven by a Lego Mindstorms NXT), this is a quick preview of its current configuration.

Stay tuned for much more on this project!

Christmas Tree cut outs – decorated version

January 15, 2015January 15, 2015Andrew

The big plan for the Christmas Trees from early December was to let my kids decorate them. We later decided to give them to all of the grandparents for Christmas; I was able to snap a few photos before we wrapped them and hit the holiday road.

Here they are. I’ll let you guess which one the toddler decorated, vs the 4-year-old!

Slotted together Christmas Trees and Snowflakes

December 7, 2014December 7, 2014Andrew

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.

Go past the jump for more photos:

Box for crayons – custom engraved

December 7, 2014Andrew

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 engraved on the top of a wooden box — Ella and a small bird engraved on the lid of a custom laser-cut tabbed box.

Front view of a wooden box holding crayons — A custom laser-cut tabbed box for crayons.

Prototype Christmas Tree gift

November 27, 2014November 27, 2014Andrew

Slot-together plywood Christmas tree — 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.

Laser cut Christmas tree decoration — 2 flat pieces that will slot together to make a Christmas tree decoration. This is just a prototype made of 1/8″ plywood.

Wooden trading card box

September 28, 2014Andrew

My day job is as Production Designer for a large dot-com (I’ll see if you’re one of the 20% or so of the population that can recognize our brand). This project was to welcome our new president as part of his on-boarding, specifically as he visited Marketing. I don’t know who came up with the ‘trading card’ idea, but I got a survey link to fill out some info about me, and a request to be sure I liked my photo in the team directory. Since we didn’t want to give him a stack of loose cards, I was asked to make a box…

I made this along with the boxes for the dog and squirrel puzzles, and I’m happy with how they turned out (especially considering it was an important project and I hadn’t made a tabbed box before).

The cards were 2.5” x 3.5”, and using interior dimensions .1” bigger made them very easy to put in and take out, but not jiggle around too much.

The pieces for the bottom of the lid certainly conserved material, but I need to figure out how to manage the kerf so the pieces fit more snugly. It’s a step in the right direction and worked ok this time.

Custom wooden puzzles

September 6, 2014March 22, 2015Andrew

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!

Christmas Stocking Hangers

September 1, 2014August 31, 2014Andrew

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.

Check out a PDF of the more original artwork.Christmas_Stocking_Hangers_2013-12-09

Assembly of Christmas stocking holder base.

Comparing snapshot of reindeer figurine to simplified outline — Snapshot of a reindeer figurine and the simplified outline of it.

Laser cut kite winders

August 18, 2014August 20, 2014Andrew

A little project I did recently came from needing additional kite winders for my kids. Since the mid 90s I’ve enjoyed flying sport kites, and have tried to get my kids involved at least a little. In the Washington, DC area, the Wings Over Washington Kite Club holds a fun fly on the first Sunday of every month, typically on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Heading down there has been a nice way to give mom 2 hours free on a Sunday morning.

At the August first Sunday, I had one tube winder that was severely tangled, and just one other winder. I also knew I had some extra kites at home I’d like to start bringing, so I had to have more winders available. Since it was near the end of summer, only a small selection of kite line was still available at local retail.

With a page of results from Google Images for “kite winder” I made a file in Adobe Illustrator that looked about right. Add the names of the kids, and a generic kite’y message (along with a scribble technique I had wanted to try) and the art was ready to go. I found a few pieces of scrap at Nova Labs, and loaded the file into the laser cutter. A few test cuts, and then I ran the job.

Since the winders were symmetrical, I could easily remove the finished winder from the scrap, flip it over, and engrave the other side maintaining alignment. Easy!

Sanding the edges was the hardest part but necessary for putting a slight bevel where you hand would grip, and where the line wrapped around the winder.

Here’s a PDF of the file if you want to make this yourself: Kite_Winders_2014-08-06

AndBosta – projects and notes by Andrew Albosta

Because Andrew Albosta is too long, and rewAl.com was taken.

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