I figured out that if I cut a surfboard I could use it for the composites assignment later during the course. I am not an assiduous surfer, so I don't have my own board. It is still a sport I enjoy a lot, but to be honest, the reason I am fully excited with this project is because I didn't realize the potential of fit press cardboard construction for solving actual problems until I saw this.
Fortunately, here at Fab Lab Barcelona, we have a huge laser cutter. This will make my life easier. We used 1x1 meter cardboard for the assignment so I had to fit all the parts on this measures. It was a though one, as I used this task to also understand the later building procedure and there were tons of parts.
Once I had all the pieces distributed on 5 pieces, it was time to go to the laser cutter. This machine has different settings as it is an industrial machine. It doesn’t work with Rhino and it runs with a software that only reads dxf’s. First on the software you just assign to each geometry a value (cut, engrave or raster). This can be assigned to layers as well, which makes the process much easier. The you send the file to the machine and all the adjustments of power, speed and air pressure are done with the machine own controller. It is a bit scary at first, but at the end it works similarly to the others. Once everything is set right to press play!
Once I had my first piece cutting everything seemed right, I must admit I was reusing one of my classmates' previous settings for the same material.
As this machine is bigger, the laser power is bigger too. So as a matter of security, it has a few sensors on the side that shut down the machine if anyone gets too close. It is a feature that is useful in terms of safety, but the sensors are too close to the computers that control the other laser machines and tend to get activated unintentionally. So, some minutes after the machine had started with my first board, one of my classmates shut the machine down by walking through the sensors. Unintentionally of course!! The problem is that the file and the setting get lost on the process. It was unfortunate, but to be honest when I started taking out the few pieces that were completely cut, I realized that the settings were not that great, and most of the pieces were not completely cut from the cardboard. I had to use a knife to separate them without damaging them.
