Cutting Templates and Inlays with a Laser Engraver

When you think of a machine like a laser engraver like this one, what's real natural is that you think of doing work like this, where I've laser engraved a logo and my name onto this glass coffee mug. And that's a great application for engravers. But what I want to talk to you about today is using this as a way to cut templates and patterns and to do inlaying projects. So here's what happened in my case, I needed to do a Bombay style chest. And if you've ever seen them, Bombay chests have a lot of curves to them, so I needed to generate a pattern so that I could create those curves. So the way I did this is I went out on the web and I found this image right here of a Bombay chest, brought it into my photo software. There we go. I rotated the image one click to the right and then what I want to do here is just do a little crop and isolate out that curvy leg. Now I'm going to copy this and I'm going to bring it into some drawing software that I have where I can do a paste. And I'm also going to expand this now. It's just, so it's a little easier for me to work on. What I want to do is using my drawing software, I'm going to copy the curves on this leg in order to work on a pattern for my leg. Once I got this far, if you look closely, there's just a real fine hairline that surrounds the leg on the image. Then I can come back and delete the original photo. Now I've got just a couple of little woopty-dos on here. So the next step, what I'll do is I'll clean those up and then we'll come back and have a look at the cleaned up lines and where I'm going to go from here. I cleaned up my lines. Now what I'm talking about here is I've got a much better looking curve on this leg. I also went up to my software and I told it I need a leg that's just over 21 inches long. Using that parameter, I established the overall length of my leg. Now, in order to make this cut, I'm simply going to print. When I print the laser comes up in my dialog box and using information that's in the owner's manual for the laser, what I can do is set parameters that will allow this to cut all the way through the piece of hardboard that I have in there that I'm going to make my template out of. There we go, I got those numbers right. Now I'm going to click this auto focus, you're going to see that happen in just a second. Center engraving, that just helps me locate it on my blank. The other thing here in the dialog box that I need to change is paper size, which of course it's not paper, it's actually the material that I have there in the printer. Or in the laser. Then, okay here. Print here. That sends this image that I created in my drawing software off to the dashboard here on the laser. Now, when I press the go, button what's going to happen is the laser is going to come up and it's going to auto focus. That means it's going to find the sweet spot where the laser cuts the best. In a second I got to turn on an exhaust as it starts to burn its way through the hardboard so that we vent all the fumes outside. All right, let's see what we've got here. There's our pattern cut free from the piece I started with. Now, a couple things here, an alternative to making patterns like this, of course is you get a paper pattern, you glue the pattern onto a piece of wood, you cut it with a bandsaw, you sand it with a sander. Which is then a function of how well can you cut with a bandsaw and how well can you handle a sander? So what's neat with this is that if I can get nice fair curves, if I can get good flowing curves on my drawing software, in my computer, send those curves here, I'm going to have a perfect template. So this is just one way that we can use a laser engraver as a cutting device to create templates like this. If you need something that's longer than the machine you do it in two pieces. Next thing when I want to show you is how you can make both the hole and the plug to create an inlay in something like a knife handle that I'm about to show you. In this case I'm going to do things just a little bit differently, I'm going to do a setup that allows me to create a hole into which I can put a matching plug. So on my computer in my drawing software, I've got a little five-sided star. In the laser, I've got a knife and the pointer on the laser is showing me that it's located in the right spot. So here again with my software, I'm going to go to my print command. I'm going to set up my driver in order to burn correctly, so that I get the plug burned into that knife handle. Everything looks good there. Send this to the laser, which again, acts just like a big printer. And now what you'll see happen is that it's going to very quickly remove a star shaped recess out of that handle. Now let's get that knife out of there and have a look at what we've got. See my high-tech hold down system here, masking tape. So that gave us a recess here in the handle. Now let me get set up in the laser for the piece that's going to create the plug to fit inside here. Here on my computer, I'm going to use the same star, but I'm going to change the manner in which I print this. Go into my dialogue box, changed to a vector form of engraving. Change the settings here. Now this is very cool. What this is going to do is cut the outline of that star out, making a perfect fit for the handle. So the gist of this is that I'm using the same image to create both the negative and the positive. I don't want to push that in there too far 'cause it's a great fit and I've got to get a little bit of glue behind it. So that's going to snug in there, after the glue is dry, sand that surface off, and when that's done, it's going to look like that. Creating a perfect plug and a perfect fit that we get between those two components. So it's a really cool thing about these lasers that like I said, you think about laser engraving, this is laser cutting and with the beauty of the marriage between my computer software and the laser itself, and it's pretty intuitive to do. We can create inlays, we can cut patterns, there's all sorts of stuff you can do using the laser as a cutting tool.