Lately I’ve found a place where I really like to go: “Le Dôme” in Caen (France).
It is a collaborative space for innovation, aimed to professionals and individuals. Besides the different events occurring in this place, there is a fablab at the core of the building.
I passed all the trainings to be able to use the different machines: from the embroidery machine to the big CNC router. Among these, the Trotec laser cutter stands out by its ease of use and production speed. One of the difficulties with this machine for a newbie is knowing how to draw with vector graphics. Lucky me, I’ve been using Inkscape since I was a teenager.
To train, I decided that this year I would build some gifts with the laser cutter. But nothing very fancy for a first project, just some coasters (without a doubt one of the most popular projects to get started with a laser cutter).
Here is the result that I will offer to my parents.
This is a set of 6 geometric coasters with a support to store them. It’s made of 5mm poplar plywood. I chose to spray transparent varnish on it.
You can see some smoke marks on the coaster. A quick sanding will remove it. If you want to prevent these marks, you can put some masking tape on the material, then cut with the laser and finally remove the tape. Like this, the mark will not be on the material.