diy furniture ideas

well welcome to another lightblade learning lab, today is a fairly cool day outside um you may notice that we've got some rather nice glowing red lights in here um.. my temperature system down there tells me it's eight degrees in here at about nine degrees i have my heating system coming on to make sure that this

machine never gets anywhere near freezing point we've been rather gloomy in the past few sessions about looking after yourself looking after the machine making sure that it's working well all the things that might go wrong with the machine don't get me wrong they are unlikely to, but if they do then it's

best to be prepared today we're going to go into something slightly lighter now my background is engineering i've always worked with metals wood glass plastics electrics hydraulics i accidentally stumbled upon cardboard engineering when i needed a project for my other machine over there to test and demonstrate ordering of cuts now we've already done

some ordering of cuts but today we're going to go back into cardboard engineering and we're going to use ordering of cuts again in a quite a big way cardboard engineering is absolutely a fascinating subjects a mix of engineering and artistic talent now i have to admit to having almost zero

artistic talent i might be a designer as such but being a designer and being an artist are poles apart today what we're going to do is create some cardboard vehicles for moving forward to learn about engraving putting pictures onto various surfaces and it's a springboard for the future now if you want lots and lots of

projects this is not the site to be on we will be doing quite a few projects and we will be doing them in depth if you want to rush ahead with some projects you can go and look on various other websites like you can go and look on the trotec tech website you can go and look on the epilogue website you can go and look on monicas

creative room which is a fantastic website for producing cards and all sorts of things there's pinterest there's there's a whole world of craft and creativity out there on the interweb cardboard is not an expensive material but if you find it is too expensive than hey there's lots of free cardboard around you might want to engineer your

project initially in a a cheaper form of cardboard and such a cheap form of cardboard is the inside surface of cereal packs the cardboard used for cereal boxes just about the right weight so hey it's a very cheap commodity to start cardboard engineering with ok that's enough chat let's get into rdworks and start doing something we'll be

back here shortly to do some cutting okay well he's a little first cardboard project it's basically a little gift box so this is nice and plain and simple at the moment but we will decorate it later on but what we'll do first of all is we'll go and make sure that the box itself works we can't get both of these out of the same piece of card so

we should delete that this whole project designed around a4 size cards which you can easily buy a quick look at this project tells us that we've got an outside shape some holes and some perforations now all of those things are going to be cut and we'll be able to do that all with the same setting so we can do that on one layer

we can have a look at the cut parameters i will show you how i go about actually finding the right speed when we get onto the machine i'm going to guess at the moment and say that we could probably do this it around about it depends on the thickness of the cardboard it depends on the lens that i've got fitted to the machine and i know that i've got a

one-and-a-half inch lens which is quite a scalpely type lens it's pretty good piercing through things with a fine cut so i think that we should probably have a speed of about maybe let's start off at 15 millimeters a second because it the card is a little bit thicker than i would normally use and we'll have a power now

power is a funny thing because there's a strange phenomenon that occurs which you've heard me talk about before it's a hissy characteristic that the beam has at low currents the beam isn't properly formed and it goes into a high-frequency high-power cutting mode and i exploit that a great deal for card cutting so we'll make it fifteen 15 and at some

future date i'll explain more about this high frequency impact engraving mode that i'm using here it's not something you can define it's something you've got to find out for yourself with your particular tube okay we're happy with that now all we got to do is order the cuts well if we take a look up here at the

moment i'm going to take you to this little edit cut property if we click on there we shall find we've got hundreds 105 elements that make up this drawing let's do cancel and what we're going to do is first of all we're going to click on the outside shape so that's the outside should we check the outside

shape is red continuously all the way around which it is and we'll put that into a group now we don't really need to put that into a group because it's just one item but the reason we're putting it into a group is because we're going to do this next we're going to mark the whole lot very simple but then i'm going to hold down the shift key and i'm going

to subtract the outside shape by clicking on it like that so now we've got everything that we didn't mark in the first group and we're going to put that into another group which is the second group ok let's now go and have a look at our cut properties right so what we need to do is make sure that we do the

perforations first so we mark the perforations by clicking on that group and that's element number two will use the two hours at the top there and transfer that element across to a new list and then we've got this item here which we can transfer across the list as well so we know we've cut the perforations first and the outside shape

second okay we're happy now i'm using this offline computer at the moment still so we've saved that to you file and there will backtrack as i've shown you before with controls aid and will step back several steps until we get back to the original drawing and now we can delete this item we can program these now if these are

made out of the same material we've already got the cut settings up there so we don't need to worry about that but we need to do is to sort out the order now again we can see that we've got outside shapes and we've got inside shapes we want the inside shapes to cut first so what we do will click on the outside shape here hold down the shift key and

click that outside shape as well because that's nice and simple to do so now we collected to outside shapes and we'll put those into a group and now all i've got to do is click on the whole lot hold down the shift key and remove the first group and there we go so that's everything else now collected into a second group and we happy with

so let's go and look at our cut properties and we need the holes cut first so let's check that will put those across into a group and then we'll do the outside shape put that across into a group and we done so programming is as simple as that and we'll save that to you file and we call that box too ok that's gonna cut those okay well here

we are machines as i promised you were going to be using them scrap cardboard to do outside work with now we've got two types of cardboard here we've got some great stuff and white stuff now they feel about the same thickness but when they're going to cut the same we can't really say so to try and find out we're going to use the

great with bobby's it's not really very flat and flat is something that we need to be if we're going to be using a one-and-a-half inch lanes because the one-and-a-half in flames has only got focus range of around about a millimeter or millimeter and a half but before we do that we really want to try and find out what the cutting parameters are and

a quick way of doing that is to use a scrap piece of material and i'm going to load up onto the machine here 40 millimeter test square programmed into here but the parameters are wrong at the moment we're going to change the cutting speed to we say 50 let's take it up to 20 and see what happens and now we'll just set the height

correct now i've got a couple of gauges here which are step pages one of the measures in half millimeters and the other one measures in millimeters so this one for instance that step is five millimeters and on this one the step is 5.5 so i've got one which steps up in millimeters and another one which is half a

millimeter bigger which gives me the increment in between for the one-and-a-half inch lens are gotten here i need to have a six point five millimeter gap underneath it and then we'll just select the schedule button and we'll take the take it down the shade and there we have six and a half liters

simple as that no just a frame just test it we go let's cut that nicely it's got a black age on it as you can see which means that we've got some burning taking place as well as cutting so we can still go fastest so does that mean to say we can go to 55 let's try 55 that's a hell of a lot different than we

started with wow now just try the test again now we're getting virtually no mark off eh so this is the real test when you get a nice clean cut you know that you've nearly rich the

maximum speed that you can we'll try 65 but i think 65 is going to file on the basis of what i've just seen 65 still drops out we've got a very nice eh on it it's hardly burn at all now you can't see but what i will do as i would put it onto a piece of white card so that we can see what happens

look at that virtually no market at all just the merest hit one mark and then the age goes clean so even at 65 we're still not at the limit let's try 70 and now it doesn't drop out it does just about but it didn't drop

out so i think we've reached more or less the limit let's just check what the edge condition is virtually clean so what do we do that we run the risk of running at 75 or do we stay safe and go to 65 president because any real

question here is it will drop it back to 65 knowing that it's gonna work perfectly well so they're the settings that were ideally looking for now fifteen percent 50-percent 65 millimeters second now that's the first thing that we need to do and this this procedure that i've got here a gradually increasing speed

checking the age finish until it doesn't drop out is the standard procedure for trying to find the best cutting speed that you can i've got another variable here which is the air now if i turn the air down it could change these seconds at the moment because i'm cutting cardboard all words or any other organic material you need

the most air that you can possibly get if this was a critic then the rules would be different but i need maximum airflow at the moment for this particular arrangement we'll go into doing the same sort of tests for checking other materials in another session but i thought i would just show you that procedure to start

i'm using this bait at the moment because this is only a prototype i would normally cut card on a pin bait we set the pin bigger to do the job for real towards the end of this video but my well causes another problem which will do with as we approach

so later on when we come to do the real box will set up in big but we're just trying to do a quick prototype at the moment it doesn't matter if we get marks on the back of the box anyway we'll set the origin there will check the frame that works so we've done for it they can hear the hissing noise

at some stage you may hear the noise go quiet when it's doing the outside oh that last little bit went quiet hopefully we've got this right just on the verge of breaking through or not and that's because of the other possible problem that mean way we may well have encountered with this machine but we struggled to get this car down

over this corner here which probably means that there's something bitter with the flatness at the table over this corner the table might not be level because remember i told you that this this particular lens is very sensitive to height let's put some folds in here remember put some three bins in here

like this and then across the bottom we need to follow the bottoms up like that 90 degrees you've got to glue voltages together let's go and do that with some double-sided tape well here we got some very strong and double-sided tape is industrial quality

and call vhb tape and as you can see it's made by a company called tester or teaser page they're cut the excess off and then we need a small piece on here well that's a double-sided tape attached there now it's just peel the backing off a little bit will put a tab on it like that we folded across at 45 degrees and put a tab on it will take this one off

i put the tap the wrong way is forward to tap out the other way like that because what i want to do is fold the whole thing flat and lay it together they're like that where it's not sticking make sure everything is lined up and then we'll go to the other end where the glue is we can press that down now we know that everything's lined up

what we can do is we can pull this out and everything's nicely stuck together now the first thing we've got to do is a bit of a tricky job because we've got to get these for overlapping get this get this little rosette shape on the top there and then we should be able to push the whole lot together like that right now that's the ideal situation that you

want but the neatest solution would be to have all of that inside which all these four places in words like that mm and you can see how we've got like an internal rosette they're ok they're all nicely lined up with each other okay so now we've got a little rosette and the inside there what we need to do is get something

round and flat on the end and here we've got pen with a nice big top on it and i'm i will block the view for you but i'm trying to put pressure in the center there and push it down and there we go now pressed it down when we look at the bottom the bottom is nice and neat so that's the first part done and now what

we've got to do we're gonna go around these parts and we've got to fold these in words like this and ultimately we're going to finish up is doing this but several things i notice first of all these pieces haven't come out here so the game we think we got the speed right but we haven't got the focusrite so i think we ought to go back and take a

look at the focus issue before we do the real thing we're not going to remove the honey candidate what's underneath is this far table so what i like to do is to use this to face for an alternative and this is something that i have made and it's nothing more than a piece of folded still the great advantage of this

is it produces an even flat surface for me to put my pin bed on but before i put the pin based on what i'm going to do that to check the flatness of this and there we go look up made that so that's just a snug fit under 15 millimeters and it doesn't go up onto the 16 14.5

still got something like about point2 under the 14.5 with a point to gap makes it about 14.7 15 is what we're looking for and you believe that 15 is what we got to say that forget that 14.3 so that's what a table looks like now when we were doing this you might remember that i pointed out this corner over here was a problem

corner and sure enough it is a problem corner not terribly so i mean i had about 45 millimeter offset from my chinese machine when i checked the table so this one is pretty near perfect but not quite so what we're going to do we've got some material here which is points7 of a millimeter thick and i've got some cardboard here which is point

three of a millimeter thick your names are perfect dimensions for me to make a washer great advantage of having a lazy you can do your own fixes one workshop two washes points7 and one washer points3 about that okay well hopefully with no fixed the problem so here's the back corner and

i've set that to 15 and that is you can hear from the way the air is stopping of just about got that corrective 50 near the front corner here outside us within probably about point 1 to point to a minute later fear correct and this front corner here i'd say that's probably within point one in the back corner i would say that this spot

on so it basically got 15 15 minus point 2 minus point one so i don't think we really going to worry too much about that that's near enough as perfect as we can get a table but one thing we didn't do is to check the middle of course 50 spot-on now the reason i need the table set so perfectly

it's because i'm going to be using these but this is my pin table which i always used for cutting card i much prefer to have the card sitting up in the air so that any of the debris falls right the way through and if you look carefully on this surface here you'll see that it is slightly pockmarked and that's because the excess energy that passes through

the card gets absorbed into this surface here and does not reflect up and produce any burn marks on the back of the card so here we've got some dowel pins here 33 millimeters long i'll sit those around the age to support the card that's pretty good there's a slight tendency fins to move just a little bit in the home because no

matter how could you get holes they've got to be absolutely perfect to stop the pixar movie so we don't really want the card to be moving around in space so what we do have a couple packing pieces there and i have a steel block we sit on top of those packing places

now we got that card on top there now the middle of the moment is unsupported now because this is not a really complicated job but we do just put two or three pins in the middle ages to support the middle i just put the edge of that card on the steel block and hold it in place with a couple of magnets

there we go so the card is now absolutely solid in space just set the debt 6.5 he had he was gone quiet now this time we should find it just drop set so there's a part 1 part to it as well and part 2 which basically is the beaufort the box will make it out of a pretty pink

i'm not running this at the right speed this is running a very slow speed but will not turn this into it work surface with a piece of plywood you've seen how the first part works we need to fold the this is the outside here which is the hammer finish side so we'll put some folds in there to start with we need to precrease these

just put the beans in them now fold down the bottoms but before we do any more we've got to glue those two pieces together with some tape fourfold on that remove the other feedback intake completely check everything's lined up hold up there because it's not sticking and then the bit here which is sticky will push it

down and then we'll put this piece of tape out and stick the rest now we've got to just tuck these pieces into remember and then we've got to try and get them arranged so that they from they make that internal rosette so i hope you can see that they're nice and symmetrically arranged into that nice little rosette and now we got to do

is to go inside and push the center down never again it's a beautiful job push these corners in and the whole thing falls in drops at fulton jumps out like that ok so that's the box assembled now we got to do is these little pieces here now this is dead easy because all we got to do is fold them in half is a crease

line across the middle before you put them together while you want to hold it with your fingers just spread them out a bit like that so that they're separated now we do the same to the other one if we look at the easiest see they're not quite the same one has got a slot in the top and the other one has got a slot in the bottom now the one that's got the

slot in the top needs to go on first what we're going to do we're going to close the whole box up we have clicked that should go into that slot like that and this one should go into this slot and then you should be able to do the same with this one because this one will now drop over the top will drop through there like that

then we should go to put that one in that slot and this one in this slot and there we have a little presentation box but no we've made a little presentation box and i had planned to try and get it decorated and do a bit more with it today but sadly i think we're running out of time and i think we should have to put this into a a part 2 which is

good in a way because we should be able to squeeze a lot more into part two why don't have time in part 1i think because i'm a bit of a finicky so-and-so it wasn't absolutely essential to set that table flat and i have to just say that because there was no fault on the part of think places at that table wasn't perfect

it was not bad at all because the lenses that are supplied usually or 2-inch lens at a half-inch names and forage means now i'm using a one-half inch limbs which has got a particularly fussy depth sensitivity and i had to make sure that that table was set spot-on to do the job as you've seen it didn't work quite in one corner because of slight variation

in depth that does demonstrate the sensitivity of one-and-a-half inch lens but a one-and-a-half inch lens is a fantastic lens for cutting card you could do the same thing with the 2-inch lens and had i been using the 2-inch lens the table variation would have not mattered one little bit at all no blame for anything on think later or the

chinese company to put this together and it's just me being ultra fussy so thanks for your time today you need to think about the loved one that you're going to give a gift to because we're going to put some sort of presentation logo on this next time goodbye for nap