hey everybody its norm from Testim and welcome to a Show and Tell where I want
to share with you a project I've been working on lately but before we get
started I also want to acknowledge that well the world is kind of crazy right
now it's things are messed up and we've been talking about it on our podcast
this week openly and honestly and hopefully that's been helpful for you
out there but we also want to acknowledge that it's a lot and we all
need to take time to take care of our own
not so health and often times just take a moment to do something else and for us
and for many of you the reason that you guys watch us is because you make things
and we want to celebrate making things and we find that making things whether
it's putting together Lego or designing something can be very
calming and therapeutic and for me personally it's a way that I can Zone
into my own thoughts and be introspective so this past weekend while
things have been going on and very crazy I decided to embark on a laser cutting
project but I've had on my mind for a little while now
you know while working at home I've been doing a bunch of small model kits you
know Bandai style kits but I don't have a ton of space for it and a lot of that
work I do is right at this table right at this desk where I also podcast and
record videos because I have a lighting setup for it and I do a lot of this work
on you know on cutting mat so this is like a very standard cutting mat now
even cutting mat comes in a ton of different sizes I personally like this
sides eight and a half by eleven fits on this desk not expensive at all and I can
use this for whether as a grid just for piecing together some Gundam some Star
Wars Bandai doing tiny paper craft projects Oh or used as a base to do some
weathering right but one thing that I found is that because I'm working on a
small space and I need to move around and not all my projects get completed in
one I find that I'm unhappy with the
sturdiness of this like this is rigid and you know I can hold things on it but
it's also not the most stable platform for you know keeping things together and
setting things aside so one idea I had was to make kind of a stand or a riser
for this size of cutting mat and recently we published one day build
where Adam made an assembled die filer and I really was liked and was taken
with the stand that he built for his die Philo it's actually an awesome build
yeah Adam makes a couple funny mistakes in building a jig to piece together that
stand but I have access to a laser cutter and so I booted up the OB
illustrator and then designed this guy so this is a riser slash stand and I was
experimenting with the glowforge thick material so it's about 0.2 inches and
it's very much inspired you can tell from Adams stand in terms of the 45
degree angles you know this type of cut out here I decided to have two bars of
support some inset pieces right here as well as a little bit of a stability and
it's two layers thick so there's a little bit of material on the inside as
well that then supports you know a cut of sheet of ply like this is engrave
tested logo on here that can fit right on top and so it can be just a tray for
working on and storing project materials or since it's perfectly cut to fit one
of these it can also be a work surface for all sorts of projects and you know
one of the benefits of laser cutting is you can be very precise and I was very
satisfied to get this perfectly inset for eight and a half by eleven cutting
mat so I've put the out on Thingiverse there'll be links in
the description if you want to laser-cut your own it is scaled 4.2 inches so 1/5
of an inch not exactly cor inch material but if you have illustrator or Inkscape
it's not too difficult to scale those tabs to get it to fit and as I've been
working with this one of the happy accidents of having this type of design
is about 1.5 inch thick is that also perfectly allows me to inset my helping
hands which I have here and it sits right perfectly on top so very easy to
store other accessories around it so that was a nice happy accident and once
I also had this riser slash tray design I started thinking about well what are
the different other different things I could do with this as a riser and so I
found two other uses actually that I thought were fun that could do with this
design the first is actually inspired by a youtuber Matt who makes useless
inventions and he took his glowforge and a a web app that for designing puzzles
and built a coffee table that was also a puzzle tray and so while I don't have no
need for a coffee table I have a tray and so I decided to also use this as a
bed for a puzzle and so it's a little platform that I've now designed a little
jigsaw puzzle and the web app allows you to scale the puzzle pieces to any
dimension a number of pieces I've done a 6x4 here and engrave you know a little
bit of a drawing as you'll see in the b-roll and well I don't need to assemble
the puzzle on camera for here it's super satisfying to then assemble it and have
it assembled and have it as a little bit of a display piece and underneath this
tray if I pop out the puzzle pieces which will jump cut to I've also laser
cut out this tray which slots in to the riser
and so when I'm assembling the pieces they don't fall through because they
perfectly fit here and then as I'm maneuvering around I can easily also pop
out pieces if I need to rearrange them and have easy access underneath as well
this was a complete arbitrary scale and design so that's six by four I could
have done this as you know eight by six maybe smaller made the puzzle pieces
smaller for something more complicated but this was super simple to assemble so
that's a secondary use for this riser design now the third use I found was
also now thinking of it as not only a tray and a riser but also as a platform
so I did a revision and these are cut out another version for which I could
then put this which is just a sheet of frosted acrylic and so this is the
second revision I have of the riser slash platform where as you can see on
the inside I've taped in as a lining an LED light strip super cheap you can find
it on anywhere online and what then allows me to do is take this piece of
frosted acrylic place it right on top again laser-cut so perfectly inset here
and then plug it into a power source so that I can then have it as an
illuminated riser for all manner of display you know whether it's four
figures or collectibles I have four photography projects essentially becomes
a nice soft light box I can illuminate from underneath add lights around it and
with this type of LED light strip I can also change the illumination and again
adds another interesting use case for this type of design this project was
super simple allowed me to just work more in Illustrator or something that I
have frankly been kind of in ten to work in over the past couple years
but now that we're in lockdown I just have some more time to work with it do
some laser cut projects and hope you enjoyed it hopefully inspires you to
make something I'd love to see what you're making at home and if you do have
access to a CNC machine a laser cutter or even a vinyl cutter that can cut into
thin pieces of wood I do have the SVG's for this project available in the
description below that you can download and check out but I'm going to spend
there was some more time taking some photos I'm really liking using this as a
lighting platform and I'm gonna take this design and maybe apply it to scale
it for different sizes smaller bigger and apply it as basis for all the other
objects I have in my home office so thank you for watching thank you for
being part of this community and for being open-minded and engaging with us
as we're all going through these times right now hope you all stay safe hope
you're all staying kind to each other and we'll see you next time bye