Custom Wedding Cufflinks - My name is not Andy

A simple rounded rectangular cut shape with the name or role of the wearer engraved on 3mm Bamboo.  The bamboo is treated with Danish oil to harden and protect it as well as to stain it to a darker colour.  Small golden cufflink blanks from eBay are then glued to the back to finish the piece.  The shape and fonts can be changed to suit the groom’s interests too.

Very simple, very quick, looks nice and makes the wedding just a little bit more ‘personal’ for the photo shoots.

[Also have a 3mm Black Acrylic version, too lazy to photograph...]

Note : My name is not Andy and I’m not the Groom

Quad-Hyperboloid - Pink Monofilament <-- That's a mouthful

I ordered the ‘stool’ in 4 materials, corrogated cardboard, 3mm Bamboo, 3mm Black Acrylic and 6mm Clear Acrylic.  The 6mm Clear acrylic is what you see here.  The top of the stool is supported by 4 ‘pillars’ with an additional 4 support beams for the 3mm materials.  The idea is to use monofilament wire to create multiple hyperboloid surfaces from top to bottom to create a ‘cool’ look.  Of course it helps that the monofilament I used is fluorescent and would glow under UV light

Can you count 4 hyperboloid surfaces?

The clear acrylic with pink monofilament example shown is a classic demonstration of the fact I’m slightly hopeless counting.  I had originally planned for 2 criss-crossed hyperboloid surfaces but due to a miscount I realized I screwed up on the first reverse weave.  Deciding to run with the mistake rather than going back to fix it I ended up with 4 hyperboloid surfaces, doesn’t look THAT bad… You can see the concentric ‘rings’ of each hyperboloid surface in the next photo.

Concentric circles look cool

A better selection of how many surfaces and curvature would improve the aesthetics greatly.  Its also rather big, would suit someone with a large bottom I suppose.  Overall not a bad experiment result though.

I’m looking forward to the Bamboo and Black Acrylic versions  Really looking forward to taking a photo under UV light too!

WTF Laptop Stand - Cardboard & Acrylic

¹Welcome to Finland / Waratah Train Fleet / Wednesday Thursday Friday / Worse Than Failure etc – Its not what you think.

Why the?

Lots of WTFs!

Ever since visiting Finland last year, it really nagged me that they didn’t have any souvenir T-shirts that read ‘WTF’ (Welcome to Finland).  Add to that the announcement that the Train project at work I’ve been working on has been named ‘Waratah‘, a fleet of trains called Waratah… Waratah Train Fleet, there really can not be a more suitable name.

How the?

A quick doodle on a notebook, quickie sketch in Inkscape and an upload to Ponoko later comes the WTF Laptop Stand.  The design is simple, two parallel sheets of acrylic or cardboard with joined WTF letters and a cross beam/bar to hold it together.  Snap fit so it can be taken apart quickly and put into a bag.

Cardboard WTF Laptop Stand Frame

What the?

Of course with the ‘quick doodle’ and ‘quickie sketch’ comes a price – I screwed up by not remember to actually measure how wide my laptop actually was! Argh.  Luckily its rather trivial to cut up the cardboard version and shorten the joining piece to come up with something usable.

I also forgot to do some fancy logo engraving/cutting in that cross beam too

Cardboard WTF Laptop Stand Frame (Shortened)

Now now, all better.  Now my laptop will actually sit on the stand properly

WTF Laptop Stand - Cardboard Side View

HP ProBook 5310m sitting on a Cardboard WTF Laptop Stand

WTF Laptop Stand - Cardboard Side View Closeup

The last shot above shows how the ‘W’ actually holds the laptop up in place.  It also shows a minor design flaw where I forgot to add a fillet on the inside of the ‘W’.  A fillet is important on materials such as acrylic to avoid create an unnecessary stress point where the piece might break.  Infact I broke a few trying to snap a piece that wasn’t fully cut through … [Ponoko shipped me extra in the package which made up for it].

Where the?

Where are the design files so you can make your own?  Is anyone actually interested?  Let me know through the comments and I can post the ‘fixed’ [Cross bar length and the fillet on the 'W'] design files on Thingiverse if people ask.

Edit : Added to Thingiverse!  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3529

What the? (Again)

Oh just remembered to preempt the ‘what are those holes?’ question, they are an optional feature for threading monofilament (fishing wire) between the pieces to form a weave.  Just thought it might look cool but haven’t gotten around to it.  Recent obsession with monofilament will show in the next post…

Yippee

I was seriously thinking ‘Yippee!’ when I got the first of my Ponoko orders today… then I saw the ‘Yippee’ on the packaging… that was weird!

This is a gallery post of the unwrapping, too tired to assemble the bits tonight.  Can you guess what things I’m making?  [The 'Welcome to Finland' one is rather obvious...]  Post your guess in the comments!

To get the best value out of the postage though, I tagged along several test pieces of the materials I was interested in :-

1. Corrugated Card Double Layer 6.0 mm
2. PETG Clear 0.5 mm
3. Felt Blue 3.0 mm
4. Acrylic Clear TRANSPARENT 2.0 mm
5. Styrene White 1.0 mm
6. Bamboo Ply 3.0 mm

Summary : PETG & Cardboard look AWESOME.  Wonder why people don’t use the 6mm double layer cardboard more on Ponoko…

Corrugated Card Double Layer 6.0 mm

Read(view) on for more photos.

Panels

Felt Blue 3.0 mm

Corrugated Card Double Layer 6.0 mm

PETG Clear 0.5 mm

Acrylic Clear TRANSPARENT 2.0 mm

Styrene White 1.0 mm

Panels 2 (Angled because of the glare from my light on the plastics)

PETG Clear 0.5 mm

Acrylic Clear TRANSPARENT 2.0 mm

Styrene White 1.0 mm

Radiation warning comparison

Corrugated Card Double Layer 6.0 mm

Acrylic Clear TRANSPARENT 2.0 mm

Felt Blue 3.0 mm

PETG Clear 0.5 mm

Styrene White 1.0 mm

Miscellaneous close-ups

Corrugated Card Double Layer 6.0 mm

Corrugated Card Double Layer 6.0 mm

Bullet point thoughts

• The cardboard cuts and “engraves” (cuts throught a single layer really) beautifully!!!
• Both vector and raster engraving on the PETG look quite nice too, and would make wonderful business cards.
• The blue felt cut and engraved nicely, but smelt like $@#$%!#$@#.
• The 2mm acrylic cuts very nicely and very strong for what evil purpose I have in mind for it Buahahahaha.  It engraves quite nicely too but there’s a bit of white powdery residue that could be cleaned off.
• The styrene melts too easily.  Cutting and engraving melts the styrene too easily and small detail is easily lost.  You also can’t really see any engraving on it anyway… what a waste.

PS : Erm no bamboo photos because I haven’t unpacked the bamboo pieces…

Death to the unbelievers who thought this will collapse!

Read on for the build process…

Design

I wanted something different, unique, or maybe just weird and the first concept that came to me was this :

A little bit of chaos...randomly aligned support struts

It was going to be out of MDF, with the plates painted black and the supports painted red but I figured I probably suck a painting when I got drawn in by the BAMBOO material Ponoko had on offer.

Bamboo is a wicked temptation, almost 3 times more expensive than thicker MDF and limited to 5.5mm thickness I figured I needed a new design.  No need to show that here… lets just skip to see the result shortly.

Summary of design process (with links!) was to use Alibre Xpress to model up all the pieces and lay it as a flat pattern, export the flat pattern to DXF, convert it to SVG using Kabeja, check and apply Ponoko template using Inkscape and voila…

Assembly

The unpacking joy was already covered in a previous post which included a odd-ball of filler design as not to waste the material.  A replacement piece was kindly sent from Ponoko to replace the one damaged in shipping (Thank you Ponoko).  Here are all the pieces laid out on my snooker/table tennis table.

All the laser-cut bamboo pieces from Ponoko nicely laid out

Remember to use protection dear…

If you looked closely there’s a can of ‘Danish Oil’ on the table which will shortly be applied to the wood to give…

A layer of danish oil to protect and stain the wood

Shiny! Much prettier too   Wait for it to dry and flip it over to coat the other side and the process can continue!

Putting it together…

Piecing it together is as simple as slotting all the pieces together as the following photos will show.

Piecing it together bit by bit, 'Slot & Play' style.

Basics of the frame assembled, structural rigidity achieved.

Plate plonks on...

Plate slides in!

Plates lock in...with these little pieces...

Close up of the decorative bits.

Looks kind of 'weird' doesn't it?

No sticky sticky yet

I’ve not applied any PVA glue yet at this stage but just wanted to test out if it can hold some weight.  Even without any glue all the pieces are locked in and stayed all together.

All pieces in place, holds together without glue!

Rear view...

Load testing it with my PC

Load testing again with the PC on the top shelf...

Final touches…

A bit of glue here and there and felt furniture feet on the bottom of the piece as not to scratch the tiles…

PVA Glue is always good...

Furniture feet!

Furniture feet making their appearance again. Camera flash on shows a more true colour of the bamboo.

The moment of truth!

• It did not collapse. (I proved all those unbelievers wrong! Go zoom in on the first photo!)
• It is not too expensive.
• It was kind of fun and a great learning experience.
• It proves that someone (me) who hasn’t made anything with wood since higher school still can create something with these new tools.
• It is not too pretty/arty, but its different and unique and that’s good enough for me.

...it didn't collapse?!?!? (And why is this photo on its side...oops)

Side view - Media PC facing the wrong way...(oops again, so is the floor)

Rear view...

A plug for the great software and great service used to make this…

Ponoko and Alibre plug

Softbank Phone Ringing with Clear Detail Material

My prints from Shapeways have arrived!  Yippie, more photos after the break (i.e. click read more).

Another Shapeway parcel arrived in record time.  This time is a couple of phone covers for a girly Japanese phone

All the photos below are basically the goods as they’ve been unboxed without any touching up such as polishing as demonstrated by Peter Paul of Shapways here.

OEM Cover, Clear Detail Cover, White Strong & Flexible Cover

The white cover on the right is upside down when i took the photo…oops.

Clear Detail Cover

Phone ringing again with different LEDs

Kind of pretty with the girly flashy LEDs

White Strong & Flexible Cover

WS&F is kind of translucent...

WS&F again with different LEDs

Knowing the WS&F material being so translucent is useful for future projects…

The filler order…”Robust” and “Detail” material rings

I had to bump up the order to meet the minimum order so I ordered my Heart Rings in all the other Shapeways materials just to compare the materials.  Feel free to buy some hehe

Cream Robust & the 3 other detail materials

Forgot to include the WS&F and I’m too lazy to add it, but here’s the various rings stacked up ontop of each another to make comparison easier.  The empty photo frame behind is from Ponoko that costs $3/4 to make…unlike Shapeways postage is another matter

Heart Rings stacked up in-front of a plywood photo frame from Ponoko (Hi-Res photo if you click in)

Shapeway’s Great Dedicated Staff

A special thanks to Frank Geven at Shapeway’s!  You see Shapeway’s has an automated validation that checks if your model is manifold, not impossible to print etc.  One of the criteria is that the model can not be too thin which phone covers must be, so I had to add a tiny hack of a piece onto my model to fool the validation.

Frank was kind enough to E-mail me warning that the WS&F’s matching ‘hack’ piece might not print properly (I suspect it would would print but difficult to find within the unsintered material) and offered to print it in the clear detail.  I replied confessing the evil deed i’ve done and explained those tiny pieces weren’t needed at all… so boy was I surprised when I got an ‘empty bag’ in my parcel!  Looking closer…

Shapeway's (Frank G's) dedication!

Next is going to be polishing the covers and rings and seeing how they turn out!

Click more to see the gallery!

Designing and ordering was relatively easy.  But that’s a different topic for another post so lets not go into that.

Tracking your ponoko order…

There are several steps to your order on which you can easily track the progress of through a variety of methods.  The obvious is checking on the Ponoko webpage but that is cumbersome.  The next is that you’ll get notifications via E-mail on the 5 major steps of the order progress.  The one I like the best is a RSS feed which I piped to iGoogle, this is especially useful for those of us who can’t access our personal E-mails at work.

Example Progress status (my order!)

Making Progress:
started - completed 15 days ago.
checked design files - completed 15 days ago.
material paid for - completed 6 days ago.
material ordered - completed 6 days ago.
material received - completed 4 days ago.
run cut - completed 4 days ago.
dispatched - completed 4 days ago.

Tracking your ponoko order shipping via UPS…

Ponoko ships (at the time of writing anyway) via UPS and you can track the whereabouts of your package via UPS Tracking.  One thing that gave me a fright was that I totally forgot that Australia has strict quarantine restrictions on wood products and when I read on the UPS tracking page that a quarantine has been requested…argh… but it was all good.  The delivery was scheduled for 31 Dec but eventually arrived on 2 Jan, pretty good for a busy holiday season.

Opening your package

1. Avoid the ‘OMG ITS FUGLY!’ reaction, its most likely just the protective sheet’s the ponoko people apply to protect your product!  Peel it off and voila all clean.
2. The burnt edges of wood stain.  So careful of your hands and clothing when handling your parcel.
3. Check for broken pieces… One of my more critical pieces was broken on arrival, but I have a good expectation that the nice people at Ponoko will replace this once I contact them…

Some photos for your perusal…

Overall I was very happy with the Ponoko process… now to E-mail them about the broken piece…

(Note this is a generic DXF to SVG conversion and is applicable to many other CAD programs such as AutoCAD, Unigraphics, Catia, SolidWorks etc and is not limited to Alibre Xpress)

First of all what were the problems?

Firstly, as I said, its convoluted and tedious…

Secondly, by looking at the exported SVG files carefully I noticed the flightofideas plugin converted curves to polygons.  This could become a problem on parts that need to fit snuggly together.  I’ve been bitten by poor approximation of curves/splines to polygons before so I’ll hate to make the same mistake again.

Enter Kabeja!

Kabeja is an open source utility/plugin/library for converting DXF’s to various output formats including (mainly) SVG!  You can read more about it on the main webpage but it has allowed me to open DXF’s exported from Alibre in Inkscape

Yup, thats right, its an Inkscape Plugin too.  But i don’t use it that way, I use the command line/GUI version for some bizarre reason.  Yes I’m just weird.

To use it from the command line, simply go to the directory you unzipped your Kabeja to (it should contain a launcher.jar file) and type :-

java -jar launcher.jar -nogui -pipeline svg yourfilein.dxf yourfileout.svg

Or if you prefer it with the GUI, just type :-

java -jar launcher.jar

Of course you need a JRE installed, just download one from Sun if you don’t have one…

BUT THERE IS A CATCH!~~~

If you’re using this for the same reason I am, i.e. to get a decent SVG out for a laser cut, do NOT open the resultant SVG file from Inkscape!  I scratched my head long and hard, googled for hours to find out why Kabeja scaled the SVG to fit to an portrait A4 sheet…with no results.  Why?  Its not Kabeja’s fault really.

IMPORT the resultant SVG file into Inkscape.  You can even import it onto one of Ponoko’s starter kit for a headscape!  Happy Ponoko’ing!