Laser-cut Crystal Earrings

#1

Had a little down time today, so finally got around to actually designing and cutting something besides just a flat vector outline.

Some learnings:

  1. Immediately create global parameters in Fusion for material thickness, kerf, and clamping tolerances. Allows you to adjust how snug the entire design is in a few clicks, and then you can adjust each part as necessary.

  2. 3mm acrylic is 2.75mm - took 5 versions to get the fits correct

  3. To export a face of an object as a vector set, you can compete your whole design, then click on the face and make a new sketch at the assembly level and project the whole face into your new sketch. Unless you significantly change the faces of your design, this will auto update and you can easily remake your vector files for each piece.

  4. Pulling the vector files all into Ruby at the same scale is a bit arduous and was the longest part of iteration.

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PXL_20240525_182525736.jpg3024×4032 2.04 MB

V1-4 graveyard

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PXL_20240525_181309944.jpg3024×4032 1.31 MB

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#2

On your second learning, you may or may not know that there are 2 types of acrylic, Cast and Extruded.

Most people use Cast because it etches with a frost, but it’s literally cast as a liquid into a very variable thickness.

Extruded is extruded from a 3mm x x000mm hole as a continuous sheet, it doesn’t etch well but it does have better dimensional accuracy.

It would be interesting to know which you used.

The other thing to factor in is that the laser beam has a thickness (Kerf); the centre of the beam is on the line, so half the kerf is removed from all cut edges.

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#3

Hi Neil,

This is really nice and delicate work! How much did you offset to compensate for the kerf? I’m working on a similar project with 1 cm thick acrylic and aiming for precise dimensions.

Thanks!

#4

Whatever the shop acrylic scraps are is what I used

#5

It’ll be cast from what I’ve read in the past on here.