Back to Portfolio

Laser Cut Product

Laser Cut Product

Ask

  1. Project Challenge

    There's some type of STEM museum that will be opening in Rome sometime soon (at the time of writing). So we were tasked with making a laser engraved product that could be sold in a gift shop.

Research

  1. Design Research

    There wasn't much to research for this, I just had to learn how to use the software we used named Vcarve, and then I made my design.

Imagine/Plan

Imagine/Plan Image

  1. Design Concept

    I made a couple bad designs in Vcarve before making one that I was proud of. I decided to take the Science part of STEM and make my product around the chemical makeup of Salicylic acid.

    Salicylic acid structure
    Bad design 2
    Good design

Create

Create Image

  1. Construction Process

    And so I learned how to use this app named Inkscape, uploaded my .dxf file and cut it out. It took a couple attempts to learn how to set up the software right but I got it done.

Evaluate/Reflection

  1. Project Evaluation

    I think my design was pretty nice, and definitely a lot better than my original designs.

    Though I did have some problems that I would like to work on:

    • Firstly, the stems are way too thin and need to have a little bit more of an offset so that they won't accidentally break off

    • Secondly when printed out the text becomes a bit more bold then in software, so I have to make the texts thinner

    But other than that I think it was a pretty good design.

  2. Reflection

    Again, these are to sell and I see a bunch of keychains of wood sold online for 1-5 dollars on Google. So I think that these could probably sell for around 3 dollars. A 3.94 in. x 5.9 in. piece of basswood (which is what I believe we used on the project) costs around 41 dollars; so we would need to sell at least 14 to break even just including the wood and not the electricity or anything else. So I believe it is possible to make profit off this.