Jzentner

Laser-Cut Toy Car Grill

2010-09-26T16:30:00Z

My girlfriends dad Tom has a 56 Thunderbird that he restored. He recently found a child sized electric version of his 56, it's sort of a vintage power wheels. Instead of restoring it back to original Tom decided to do his own thing and make it as much like his full size 56 as possible. One of the first things I noticed is the grill that came with the car it was just a piece of wire mesh from the hardware store. Tom said that's how they were back in the day but since he wanted it to be unique I decided to take on the task of making a new grill.

Of course the first thing I thought of was using the Epilog for this. Would you expect anything else? I wanted the grill to match the real one as close as possible. The first thing I did was take a photo of the grill on the actual car for a reference. I then traced the sad grill that came with the toy car and scanned the drawing. Now that I had a digital version of the drawing I could play with it in Adobe Illustrator. In order to make it as close to the real thing as possible I counted how many squares there were both vertically and horizontally in the reference photo I had. After some math and a lot of trial and error I figured out how big my grid pattern for the mini car had to be. My original plan was to draw the entire grill in illustrator cut it out on the epilog and slap it on the car. Doesn't sound that difficult right? Wrong! None of the grill on the mini 56 was symmetrical so I was going to have to fit it by hand.

I decided to cut out the grill as shown above and hand fit it later. The next thing to do was figure out the material I was going to use. It had to be able to bend a little to fit the curve on the car and I also wanted to be able to paint it. I ended up making two grills out of eighth inch acrylic and two out of poplar. I wasn't sure about how well the acrylic would take paint or if I could bend the poplar but I just took a chance and went with it.

I cut out the wooden grills first as a trial run. They turned out perfect but I suspected that they were going to be a bit fragile. Next I cut out the acrylic grills. The first one I didn't have the power settings right so it didn't cut all the way through. I made another pass and managed to get most of it cut out. After some power adjustment the next grill cut out just fine. I tried to finish cutting out the first acrylic grill with a Stanley knife but ended up breaking it of course.

I took the remaining grills down to Tom's shop and started with the fitting. I pretty much destroyed the first poplar grill since it started breaking at all the fragile short grain parts. I then decided to make a cardboard template to trace. This sort of worked for the second poplar grill which suffered the same fate as the first grill. I was now down to one grill, the only acrylic grill I had. After a lot of patience and dremeling I finally got the last grill to fit perfectly.

I had planned on sanding the back side of the grill and painting it but Tom decided he liked it just how it was (he also didn't think the paint would stay on the acrylic).

It was a lot of work but the grand kids sure look cool doing laps around the 56 Thunderbird in the mini 56.

Painted Epilog Engraving

2010-09-24T19:23:00Z

This is a sign I made for in my old car. I etched the image about an eighth inch deep into a piece of maple. I then painted the whole sign with red spray paint. Once I had enough paint in the engraving I let it dry and sanded the whole sign. It's a very simple technique and looks super cool. Sorry about the bad photo the lighting isn't very good in the shop.

The key to doing this was to make sure the engraving was deep enough so when I sanded I didn't sand away any of the image.

Laser etching photos onto wood

2010-09-24T18:26:00Z

After having such great success with etching my tree photos I couldn't wait to try other images. I went through my entire archive of personal work and picked out images that I thought would look cool etched into wood. Using what I had learned from making the photo album I picked out several images I thought would work. With a pile of lumber and a jump drive full of images I started etching. The first thing I found out was your choice of wood makes a huge difference.

The first piece of wood is fir and you can see how the laser etches the grain differently. I like the contrast and depth you get when etching soft wood but the grain is distracting. The next image is done with a piece of exotic hardwood (can't remember the name). You can see that there is way more detail in this image and the grain is not distracting at all.

Here are two more examples of photos I etched

With some practice and a lot of trial and error I was able to make some pretty cool wood photos.

Making a sign out of wood and acrylic with the Epilog laser

2010-06-15T22:18:00Z

This is a logo I made just for fun. I figured it would be a great image to cut out with the Epilog. The only problem is how to keep all the pieces together after they were cut out. I needed a way to keep the teeth and handplane pieces together.

My solution was to inlay the wood pieces into some acrylic I had. All I did was cut the logo out in both acrylic and wood then replace the pieces.

My cutouts are glued to another thicker piece of acrylic so when it hangs on a wall the skull and handplanes cast a shadow. I also kept the wood pieces thicker than the acrylic to add to the 3d effect.

This was my first attempt at this so it didn't turn out perfect by any means but I think it's still neat.

Making a photo album with the Epilog laser

2010-06-01T15:24:00Z

Hello there,

I'm the Director of Photography for American Woodworker Magazine. I've been asked to share with you what I've been doing with the laser engraver that we have on loan from Epilog. I'm usually taking pictures for the editors of AW to use in their stories. Now I'm taking the pictures AND telling the story so I apologize ahead of time if my writing skills are not the best.

We get all sorts of tools to test here at AW but none of them sparked my interest as much as the Epilog Laser. My background in photography and digital imaging combined with my interest in woodworking seemed a perfect match for a laser engraver. The only problem was what was I going to make first? For some reason I could not come up with a project. Months after the machine arrived at our shop and I had pretty much given up hope on ever using it, I found my first laser project.

I wanted a photo album to hold all of my fine art photos I've taken over the years so I figured this would be a perfect project for the Epilog. Most of my personal photos have a very old gritty feel to them and I wanted a book to match. I dug through my collection of old lumber and found two pieces of a packing crate that were just the right size. The pieces of plywood had a hand painted address on them and one piece had a perfect spot for an engraving. I decided on a very graphic image of a tree for the front cover and mirrored tree images for the inside covers. Since this was my first etching project I spent most of the day doing tests to get used to how the machine worked. Basically the darker the area in the image the deeper the laser etches and the deeper the etching the more it burns the wood. When you're etching plywood the black areas in your image burn through the first layer and reveal the next layer of ply. Now this is the point where my photography knowledge kicks in. Here is the original image for the book cover before I modified it for etching.

I wanted the etching of the tree to be dark with a light sky like in the original image but with less shading to make it more graphic. My plywood packing crate was dark colored with light ply layers beneath. To make the dark layer the tree and the light layer beneath to be the sky I had to modify the image so it burned away the sky area instead of the tree.

The picture above is what I etched on the cover. I inverted the image so the sky would burn the deepest and gave it more contrast to make it more graphic.

The inside of the book is another tree image that I made solid black and white so it would burn the tree image through the first layer of ply. I had no idea how the inside was going to turn out, luckily the laser burned all the way through the first layer of ply and lightly burned the second layer making a very striking graphic.

It took a long time to come up with a project to do with the Epilog laser. After the photo album was done I was hooked! I'll be posting more things I did with the laser so keep checking back.