This paper protects the final model from laser burn/char marks. The Glowforge plywood material came with a thin layer of paper on the top and bottom that was easy to remove.

Here’s what it looked like after removing the rest of the board but not yet lifting out the clock design:Īll of the little interior pieces just fell out effortlessly when we lifted out the clock. We set the outline to Cut and the numbers and marks to Engrave: It was indeed very easy to import the two SVG files and to line them up in the Glowforge app. To send a file to the Glowforge you actually upload the file to their online printing app and then the online app communicates the file to the machine. The Glowforge’s claim to fame is that it is very easy to use, just plug-and-play. You can of course use any kind of laser cutter to cut out SVG designs, but this week I had access to a Glowforge at ICERM, so that’s what I used. To make the second file we shfited the imported STL file lower so that the text and marks we wanted to capture intersected the blue Workplane, then exported again to SVG. To make the first file we shifted the model slightly down to make sure we had a good intersection of the overall design with the workplane, then exported to SVG. In this example we had to create two SVG files: one for the outline of the clock and one for the numbers and hour marks. Here’s an example using one of our procedurally-generated clock designs:

This will produce an SVG file that matches the layer of the STL file that you intersected with the Workplane. Move the model up or down so that part of the model intersects the Workplane, then export to SVG format. To start, import any STL file to Tinkercad. In this post we aren’t going to talk about any of that, but rather how to create a 2D-laser-cuttable SVG file from a 3D-printable STL file using the free online in-browser modeling program Tinkercad. Ideally you should save this 2D information in some kind of vector graphics format such as SVG. You could download a picture from the internet, draw something yourself, or create an image in a program like Illustrator or Inkscape. To make files for laser cutting, you need two-dimensional information.

Inkscape laser cutting imported image