Laser Cut Face Shields

-


Over the last week I've had more time and effort than I have had clear sheets of material, so I've been merrily 3D printing face shields with a mixture of Schonne Bakkes Goggles and 3DVerkstan full face visors. Now that I have a stack of vinyl covers arrive I can ramp up production and make use of my polypropylene sheets.

I've seen various designs but this one from Kitronik fits the bill nicely, plus Kitronik is my main material supplier so it's great to be able to support them at the same time. It uses a single A4 sheet of transparency, manufactured using a standard hole punch and simple rounded corners. The Headband is assembled from 3 pieces, a visor band, a forehead band and an adjustable band. The adjuster has a clever mechanism for linking into place and staying there using the natural flex of the material.


I've seen a lot of discussion about this design and how to optimise it for the different laser cutter sizes and also people saying that it can't be cut on a small 300x400 laser cutter. I think people have been looking at this the wrong way round though. You shouldn't be looking to optimise according to the laser cutter size, you should trying to get as many as you can out of the material you have. To this end I've redrawn the files to fit as many onto each of the Kitronik sheet sizes as possible. From there I've split the design up to fit into smaller laser cutters.
You have to use scissors/knife to cut the material down into sheet sizes that will fit into your laser cutter but you'll get more visors in total afterwards. Using this approach I've been able to chop a 1050x750mm single sheet up parts, each smaller than 300x400 and only lose one single visor when compared to cutting the whole sheet on a much larger machine. (svg files here)(pdf here)(dxf here)







Popular posts from this blog

Wiring the Ruida Controller

-
Image
The RDC6442G controller from Ruida This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible. The Leetro (Pad03) panel on the left and the Ruida panel on the right The view from inside the laser looking up at the control panel The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounti...
Read more

Laser Cut Cryptex

-
Image
This is my laser cut cryptex. It features 28 different characters and 9 rings, giving a total possible 10.5 Trillion different combinations. I took a bit of time developing the design so that I could add some nice features. This cryptex file is laid out so that you can have any number of rings in your own design. The best feature is that the codeword is changeable, each locking ring has an outer letter ring that can be placed in any one of the 28 different positions. Once the rings are back in place the ring locking bars can added and they prevent the rings from being modified until the box is open again. It's a bit hard to explain so I made a video showing how it all work ( svg here ) It took a long time to assemble this so I lived with my initial design choices but if I were to remake it I would adjust the file to make the ring locking bars out of 6mm ply and maybe put some blind holes onto the code rings to prevent the code being brute forced.
Read more

Rainbow Puzzle Box

-
Image
This is a binary sequence puzzle box built from 3mm birch plywood, it uses a Gray code pattern to ultimately align all the dials into a rainbow pattern before the lid can be removed. It's actually a redesign of a puzzle inside Loki's box of Tricks  because I thought it would make a cool stand alone puzzle box. The files are available for sale in my Etsy store . ( svg here ) The puzzle consists of five interlocking disks that can only rotate when the disks either side of it are in the correct position to allow it. The large wheel in the middle and the disks on the underside of the lid further restrict the rotation of the disks. The large wheel must be pointed to the disk that is being rotated and the large wheel is in turn restricted from pointing to the smaller disks depending on alignment. Once all the disks are aligned into the full rainbow the large wheel is completely free to rotate and can be turned to the edge of the box and allows the lid to be removed. There is a very ...
Read more