Laser Cut Tile: A Lengthy Journey

I started this portion of the surface design project by converting the Hydra tile to grey scale.

Shown here is the original colour tile surface design and the grey scale side by side.

I chose to cut out the centre portion and the corner triangles.

As my tile is multi coloured I was inspired to make my own plywood out of 11 layers of dyed veneer, and white glue. I wanted to see if I could get the laser cutter to cut away the different layers and expose individual coloured veneers for part of my tile. My first appointment was an hour with Jessica and we ran my program three times as the pattern was not producing the depth or exposing the coloured layers as I had envisioned.

After this session Jessica told me that there were ways to manually adjust settings for the intensity and the speed of the laser and that through trial and error we could probably find a combination that would work. Two additional appointments and 1 hour and 45 mins later Peter and I found a combination of settings we thought would work.  Below is the result of the 34 test cuts we ran. After we set up the sequence of cuts the machine said it would take 1.5 hrs to run, and the night and weekend technicians can't allocate that amount of time to my cut as they have to float between departments, so it had to wait.

Peter and I got to run it today. I really like it a lot better than the first run, with the depth of the layers and the many colors the laser managed to expose. I chose to eliminate the cutouts in the second cut.

Again a huge thank you to Jessica and Peter, for the 4+ hours of help to complete this project, I greatly appreciate it.