Wooden Sunrise - Laser Cut

I made a wooden sunrise figurine. This was created by configuring my idea in Fusion and laser cutting the design out of 1/8 inch thick plywood.

Plywood, 1/8 inch thick, was the material used. Fusion, Inkscape, and Adobe Illustrator were the programs used.

Initially, going into this project, I had attempted to do a lily pad design, and I actually got so far that I had sketched some of it in Fusion, which is shown here. The design seemed enticing, but as time went on, I realized how difficult it would have been to understand how to generate a press fit formation with the lily pad design. In my initial ideas, I was just kind of "stabbing" the leaves into the lily pad and not interlocking them. I had created slots for the leaves to poke through and placed them onto the lily pad design, measuring out the distance between the holes, and wanting to create leaves the width of the two slots together, as well as the piece in the middle of them. However, as I started to format this, it became difficult to understand how to generate the design so that it ended up interlocking. Eventually, I decided to scrap the lily pad. However, testing out the lily pad design had me wanting to work with a circular formation in my final design, and that is how I decided on the half circle for the sunrise in my final form.

After deciding to scrap the lily pad idea, I decided on manufacturing a sunrise figurine inspired by a tattoo I have, and I wanted to try and work with laser cutting radial formations. In the initial design process, I did not know if I wanted my sun rays to be curved or not, but I decided on triangles for the rays. Furthermore, I knew I wanted the rays to be pretty large in comparison to the half circle, so I thought about those proportions, and I additionally workshopped a base rectangle for the bottom of the circle to slot into and balance on. Most of the ideation process was just thinking about where to place the cuts on the differing pieces so that everything would slot in properly.

This shows my process in Fusion. I had started with designing the base/half circle. For that, I had just created a circle and then put a line in the middle to cut it in half, and deleted the part I did not want. From there, I thought about how big I wanted the half circle and set the width to 4 inches and the radius to 2.05 inches. Then I made the first cutout in the middle, utilizing a rectangular shape. I wanted the slit to go in .4 inches from the top of the circle, and I set the width as ply. However, in the images, you can see ply was initially set as .10 inches, as I did not understand that the parameter of ply had to actually reflect the thickness of the plywood we were using, so later on I adjusted the ply parameter to represent .125 inches or 1/8th inch thick, which was the thickness of the plywood utilized. Then, after I copied and pasted my rectangles onto the right side of my circle, I then mirrored those rectangles down the construct line I had created in the middle of my circle, so they could be perfectly measured on the other side as well. Afterward, I had constructed the rays of the sun. To do this, I used the conic curve shape to create a point and then added a line at the bottom to create a triangular formation. The sides of the triangle measure 2 inches, and the bottom line width measures 1 inch. In order to make sure that I was working at the correct angle of the space of the radius I was trying to slot into, I used the ability to make different components for shapes to make a new component and sketch a plane for each shape I constructed. I had utilized the midplane tool to construct the sketches of the rays directly between the rectangle cutouts I had crafted inside the half circle. To create the cutout in the shape, I had projected my rectangular cutouts that I had created on the half circle, and perfectly matched the rectangle I made on the triangle. And when I extruded the rays, I did not select the rectangle portion. For the bottom rectangle slab, the width of the rectangle was .40 inches and the height was 1.3 inches. Again, I had used the midplane technique to construct the slab sketch directly between the area of my bottom rectangle. I wanted the rectangle to be a lot smaller than the half circle so that it would not visually overpower it. Then, for the cutout created to slot in the half circle, I used the same procedure I did for the rays, which was to project the bottom rectangle cutout from the half circle onto the sketch plane of the bottom slab and just follow the exact measurements of that rectangle. Then I had made one final sketch that was just a basic rectangle, apart from my object. After my shape was fully built, I went into manufacturing mode and made a copy of my shape. Then, I arranged my pieces so that they would lie on the rectangle sketch I created and be ready to be exported and cut. I then used my pieces lying down on the sketch as the area that I wanted to export as my DXF file and downloaded that into Illustrator so that I could erase the construction lines Fusion generates.

The images shown here are of my first go at the laser cutting, as it took two cuts to get my end product finalized. The first cut had three main issues. First, I had left too much space in between my shapes, and so I accidentally wasted some material, so definitely a lesson learned on spacing. The next issue was that I had my ply parameter set to .10 inches, which I had addressed in my digital design portion, but after the first cut, I adjusted the ply to be the correct sizing of .125 inches. Finally, the kerf was wrong on my first cut as I cut with a .5 mm kerf, but after some kerf testing and seeing how the pieces fit together, the kerf was adjusted to be .25 mm.

After redoing the ply parameter, kerf setting, and distances between shapes, I went back to cutting and got a piece that slots together perfectly! The last image has the original cut in the back and the final design in the front. In all, my final image was pretty much what I had envisioned from the start of my process. If I were to change anything, I would maybe have made the rays two different heights, so there was an alternating height pattern, and also painted the object for a better visual appearance.

The reading supported my design process by making me think more about how important units, measurements, and parameters are when turning an idea into a real object. It put a lot of emphasis on working from the bottom up, which really changed how I approached my own concept. Instead of immediately focusing on the bigger picture, I found myself more interested in what I wanted to try out or learn in Fusion, such as working with a radial design. That made me slow down and pay more attention to the smaller steps. I also realized how useful it is to really understand the smaller parts, like individual parameters, because they make it much easier to resize shapes, create new variations, or copy sections of a design in the future. In the end, the reading pushed me to focus more on detail, which I think will help me as I keep skill-building in this class.