Laser Cut Costume Jewelry

Want to make your own costume jewelry? How about a laser cut "diamond" ring from acrylic?

Materials:

Acrylic sheet. I used a 1/8 (.125") inch thick piece.

Glue: Acrylic weld. I strongly recommend using an acrylic weld cement. It will give you the clearest bonds. You can use super glue but it can fog up the acrylic around where you apply the glue. I used acrylic weld 16 which is a nice thick cement. The other option is #3 which works great but is super liquid and runny. There is a link to a video on how to glue acrylic at the end of this Instructable.

To start with I created the design in Fusion 360. I use Fusion because I've found I need the 3D environment to make sure the parts fit together and don't interfere with each other. I build the model in its assembled form. This allows me to see how it will look and figure out where to put the tabs and slots in the pieces. Each part of the model is an individual body the thickness of the acrylic I was going to cut the parts out of.

Once I have all the parts modeled I break them apart and align them flat on the base plane. Then I do a sketch on top of the pieces and export that sketch as a .dxf. You can layout the pieces in Fusion but I find its faster to open the dxf in Adobe Illustrator and arrange the pieces for cutting there. Then I save the file as a .svg file and send that to my laser cutter to cut the pieces.

Feel free to use the attached pdf or svg file to cut out your own rings.

Note about the attached files

The piece of acrylic I cut the pieces out of was supposed to be 1/8" (.125") thick but I measured it and it was closer to .12" thick. So I made the slots .12" wide. If you're using a material with a different thickness you may need to adjust the side of the slots to match your material.

Now that you've got the pieces cut out, you need to glue them together. If your using the #16 acrylic weld you can put a little cement on two pieces and then press them together and wait a minute for them to set. If your using one of the more liquid cements, put the pieces together first and then add the cement to the seem between the 2 pieces. Let it flow down the seem and wick into the crack. Then let it set for a few minutes before adding the next piece.

Tap plastic sells the cements and has some good videos on how to use them:

Have fun.