hey everybody's norm from tested and it's time for another laser cutter
project as I'm spending more time making things on my glowforge these days and
trying to get over my own mental roadblocks to designing vector than
using Adobe Illustrator not only way I can do that is to keep on making new
things and iterating on that process now a couple weeks ago I shared with you a
project I had made it was a riser for a cutting mat that also doubled as a
lightbox or display stand and that's what I've been using it a lot as and
when I got the best feedback from you for so I thought why not iterate on that
and make something that's a dedicated stand for some of the figures and
collectibles I have here in my office and I thought it'd be a good chance to
explore different types of joining and piecing together laser-cut pieces as I
talked about before laser-cut assemblies kind of have made oftentimes telltale
signs of the manufacturing process because of the way they're designed
which is no fault of its not a knock on it at all it's just things that work and
are reliable of often are associated with the way they're made so for example
this is a very standard laser-cut box and you can design and make these boxes
almost automatically with web apps and websites all you do is type in the
dimensions that you want how many of these tabs how wide the tabs are press a
button and boom they kick out a vector file that you can throw on to any laser
cutter and you know well it's totally reliable and I really like it it really
has this finger joint which you've seen so many laser cut designs and which is
fine it's just a little say me in in my preference and so I really would love to
explore a different way of piecing together these perpendicular pieces and
one of the things that caught my eye was this box design that was uploaded to the
glowforge forum from polar brain freeze about a couple years ago and I added my
own little cutouts here but look at this box and how it doesn't have that
telltale finger and joint because it's not using finger joints in fact if you
look these corners these corners have
overlapping edges because the high these overlaps are actually slop joined so
while finger join connects corners like this a slot joint connects corners more
like that and so the connecting point is hidden in the seam here and what I
really love about the design this design specifically is this lid here which then
kind of with this taper connects the corners and I love this little accent
this upper lip here as well and so I think I'm gonna take a riff on this this
design is completely free and I'll include a link to that forum post so you
can check it out but I think I'm gonna use this design as inspiration to sketch
out what a display could be like and maybe iterate on it
and instead of just having one finger joint here do it throughout the entire
side all four sides because I love that this kind of almost looks like a thin
like a heatsink and that could be cool for a display so right now I've already
taken some time to do some preliminary sketches of what that could look like
and I think I'm gonna make it about five inches by five inches so it's wide
enough to support basically a sixth scale figure 12 inches that's about yeah
it's about four or five inches right there and I'm course can stand
diagonally that should be no problem but it's me interesting to try to sketch out
what it would be like to join so many of these pieces interlocking pieces to then
make an acrylic display so the only way we'll know if this works is if we try
one and make one so let's head over to illustrator and get to designing and the
laser cutting
so the way I'm thinking about this display stand it's basically gonna be a
wider and more squat version of this box design that I really like including the
way that uses the slot joints in the corners and the way that these sides
intersect and then protrude and then with that little bit of a lid and I'm
all thinking about doing in acrylic or frosted acrylic and well I have the
SPG's for this box I also want to try recreating myself because they'll be
different dimensions and I'm also gonna try this thing where I'm not only gonna
have the slot joints for the four corners but also have what essentially
is this this matrix this grid of interlocking panels that will give me
this heatsink look so the first thing I do is create my topper and the platforms
that know dimensions of box I want hopefully we want this to support five
inch by five inch panel as the base and then roughly based on my loose sketching
about an inch and a half height which should be plenty enough to put some LED
light strips on the inside as well as have enough space for sturdy support for
all these interlocking panels now this is exactly the kind of project I'm sure
would make a lot more sense to design in 3d because of the interlocking pieces
they have to perfectly fit and in 3d I could make sure that all the pieces do
intersect properly and then flatten it out and get the 2d SVG's size for my
thickness of material 1/8 inch in this case but I'm not comfortable in that
format yet and I'm really using this as an exercise in turning some sketches
into into a flat illustrator vector and I really do enjoy the problem-solve 8 of
designing something in 2d that will eventually be a 3d object that will have
thickness and we'll be built out three dimensionally a
lot of this is just more practice with creating these shapes using the shape
tool basically a lot of rectangles I then carve out by using the Pathfinder
tool overlapping shapes basically start with a rectangle then create other
rectangles or triangles overlap them and then carve them out so I get more
irregular shapes and then joining them as well using the Pathfinder tool and
what's been very helpful is one precision I'm using in the transform
panel so I get to move the shapes over very precisely by what I know based on
my diagramming to be the right places as well as the outline tool and I can
select multiple objects at once select one as the anchor and then align
everything else to basically the right left top or bottom side or Center and I
find that to be extremely helpful as I'm building up these larger shapes were
from smaller shapes so this display standard really boils down to only a few
types of components that I just need to repeat a couple times there's the
singular square top that will lock everything together as well as the four
walls that essentially makes it the same style of box that I'm imitating and
riffing off of and then basically I need these inner walls that will interlock
that will be slightly different won't be as tall so I'm really only designing
about five different things and there's a big part of this process where I'm
just staring at the monitor I'm thinking do I have this right if I make one
change here on this orientation what does that mean for how this piece is
going to fit with the interlocking piece on another orientation little changes
little dimensional changes on one piece have rippling effects and that's just a
byproduct I'm doing everything this bootstrap manual way as opposed to
designing it 3d you know I started off with the
design thinking that I was gonna try to evoke a heat sink look and I'm starting
to see that effect now in fact these flat pieces they almost look like Ram
modules with heat sinks at the top it's kind of neat okay at some point I have
to stop futzing with it and just laser-cut it to see how it's gonna fit
together so let's head over to the glowforge and do our first test cut
okay very excited got our first test cut
pieces here and ready to see if it actually fits together so as you can see
from the overhead cam this is that five inch by five inch and actually had to
reduce it by an eighth of an inch for its all makes sense and interlock the
right way but this is the equivalent of that top bracket this frame of the box
just a little bigger that was fun to design and then I might as well cut out
my little base and the space I'm thinking can be different materials in
the future right now it's frosted acrylic but it be clear acrylic and also
maybe be solid with some holes inside lots of different options here and here
essentially are the four walls which I'm pretty sure will interlock together and
I'm gonna take the the plastic covering off yes I want to see if they even fit
and looks like and it looks like yes they do huzzah okay so this is the outer
frame inch and a half tall and you can see has a lot of similar characteristics
as this box design I really like this this kind of angle here and let's see if
this topper fits over here it does very cool so if I wanted to keep it basically
like this box perlite in here you know this would serve as a very basic display
but wouldn't have that kind of heatsink look I'm going for
so the tricky part is gonna be if these work all right let's see if these oh no
okay I can tell I messed this up already I'm
missing a slot here they interlink with each other just fine but not with that
outer frame I'm do a tweak and cut some more pieces out here back okay I'm back
that was quick for you not so quick for me these no good I made a mistake
thank goodness I only cut a few of these out and I think these will work so first
of all let's test to see if they interlock with each other and they do no
problem and then let's see if they interlock with the outer frame yes very
good okay so hopefully you're starting to get a sense of what I'm trying to do
here I'm gonna have essentially you count them 20 of these going on each
axis so basically 20 will go here 20 pieces will go here and they will all
interlock using this slot joint and then by the end of it you'll see a row of
these accents on all four sides and I also recessed where the interlocks are
gave myself a little bit of a cavity on the inside to put the lights and then
this bracket will go on top and hopefully I'll look very cool so the
Zion is pretty good I'm gonna maybe increase the thickness by 0.05 for the
curve the laser so they'll fit a little bit better and then I gotta cut out like
40 of these pieces and we'll get to assembly
all right so after a little bit of assembly which was fun and then I'd hear
everything together just what's psionic relate although I could have used some
acrylic cement in this case it is come seated and I am digging it this effect
it it looks almost like something out of the original Christopher Reeve
Superman's Fortress of Solitude I love this layered acrylic I did use a mix of
frosted and clear and as I was putting it together I realized that it would
look kind of cool upside down as well that's where you really get that heat
sink look I did it off-camera put in my LED light so if I take off this top here
you can see I intricately laid out all the LEDs and I had it not only
illuminate outward and upward where I'm gonna be putting figures on here but
also down as well to get the light through as many of these sides as
possible just some cheap LED light strips had it wired out here and now
we're gonna get a moment of truth so I put this here I put a little bit of a
riser so I can elevate above the LEDs and I'm gonna plug it in here goes the
moment of truth it's probably blowing out the camera right now with this
exposure but yeah it gets pretty bright and Wow okay I really dig really dig how
the light is bleeding through the edges here let's try some test shots with some
figures on top and then also something I decided to do was as we turn
this off so it doesn't blow out the camera laser-cut some additional pieces
I can use as base plates so like and bleed through so this is just looks like
a grill you know a floor panel that kind of a figure on top of and just spray
painted some clear acrylic what's some black spray paint did the same with one
of these Stoppers try a couple different versions and so we have a bunch of
options and now comes my favorite part which is to use this in some toy
photography so let's wrap this video with some of that thank you so much for
following along with this experiment again it's just more exercises in
Illustrator and laser cutting I'll share the files for this in the links below
and it's exactly the type of project that I want to know immediately building
this one immediately work on the next version I can think of maybe something
taller smaller this ended up using about three sheets of the twelve by twenty
glowforge acrylic but a fun build again thank you so much and let's get to some
photography see you next time
you