Hackerspaces are full of people with beards. Lacking the hormones necessary to grow my own, I figured I’d make the next best thing:a ludicrous, brightly coloured, plastic goatee that hangs out of my nose. I made the first ones at thinkhaus the night before the Toronto mini Makerfaire of 2011.

Nosebeard and mustache ring (from @techknight) at Toronto Mini Makerfaire, 2011.

Neon nosebeard made at raumfahrtagentur in Berlin. Seemed like a good way to test out the laser cutter and toolchain.

Another shot of me wearing one of the nosebeards made at think|haus.

Means we ended up with this:

Laser with fire extinguisher dust.

instead of a burned down building.

For SoOnCon 2011, thingtank in Toronto made maker passports. This resulted in the need for some stamps.
I worked on the think|haus one. Didn’t get any of the final stamp, but here’s some work in progress.

We used natural linoleum sourced from Mixed Media. Important note: don’t use softoleum or other non-linseed oil based “linoleum”! These tend to be made of PVC which will make nasty gases when you laser it.

Ideally you’d get… stamp rubber… made for lasering… as our laser was designed to work with. But I had no luck finding that anywhere in store and didn’t have enough time to wait for it to be delivered.

Note: remember to mirror your image before you make it into a stamp…

You can see here what one of the issues is with using linoleum or possibly my assumed kerf thickness: you don’t really get rid of all the material, you just sort of char it and leave lines there.

That’s why I ended up going for a stamp that didn’t have a lot of negative space. The one cut out above is basically what we used, except with the whole thing mirrored so it would actually work as a stamp.

Also, linoleum is super flammable! So, you know, don’t leave your laser unattended. Not that you were going to do that, right? Right.

Air assist would make this way way easier – in fact, I cut some at site3 and they worked so much better. No charring, just material gone. Magical.

Lasering in progress. (No air assist)

For Alex’s 29th birthday, all of her friends got together to buy her an ipad. I made a case for it which included each friend’s name.

You can see the soot on the wood here. The initial coat or two of finish mean that that can be wiped off easily.

Completed frame.

I unfortunately don’t have a photo of the completed object. I finished it on the bus on the way to Toronto… It was similar to a Dodo case. I used techniques I learned doing bookbinding to make the outer case: bookboard covered with leatherette on the outside and some beautiful handmade paper on the inside. An elastic glued inside the case to hold it shut. Instead of using precision cut rubber to hold the ipad in place (the dodo technique) I used two or four pieces of elastic across the corners.

Things I learned:

• Underlay is a lovely material. That’s what thin plywood meant to go underneath flooring is called in Canada. It’s pretty, uniform, and plays nicely with the laser cutter. You can reliably cut through it and engraving likewise works well.
• My initial tests resulted in the wood getting covered with soot which got worked into the grain when I tried to rub it off. If you’ve got air assist, you likely won’t have this problem. An easy fix is to apply two layers of finish to the wood before cutting it. Then the soot can be easily wiped off.

You can find a draft svg on my github.

All this lasering is fun, but I wanted to practise actual handwork. This sled is based on this pattern.

I can do more than just edit gcode and put plastic into the laser cutter!

Everyone else at work got turbines. Hank got this. 

Because he is one classy, classy dude. Man, I miss working across from him.

So the laser takes off the paint/anodizing on whatever this metal was – probably stainless steel? Maybe aluminium.

When I left Hamilton, I gave each of my coworkers a turbine to sit on their desks and hold their business cards. Haikus were a thing at MKI – if someone made a pot of coffee or called a meeting, it was expected that the email informing the team would include a haiku. Haikus are three line poems, most wind turbines have three blades… Each person got a personalized poem on their turbine. It was a fun project! But jeeez all those fiddly parts took forever to cut. And the blades were a bit weak. I broke several during assembly, including the one below.

This table was so picturesque before someone put a bunch of Industrial Wind Turbines on it.

Detail of the pieces.

One of the things we were always trying to do at think|haus was promote the space. We had business cards which we gave to a few folks in the area. Here’s documentation of the cards and dispensers I made.

Here are the cards I made. I was super proud of them until… I realised I’d put the wrong stupid website on them. There ain’t no pipe in the url :/
They were pretty anyway though:

I was so proud until I realised the typo in the URL.

And here are some shots of boxes I made to put them in in various stages of completeness:

MDF is a lovely material for cheap prototyping.

Fire! But not too much fire.

You can see the trail of soot left from cutting through at the bottom. I later solved the aesthetic issue of this in inlay by applying one or two layers of clear varnish before lasering. Then the soot can just be wiped off.

New address (25 Dundurn) but old logo with the capital letters.

Trevyn bought an AVR Dragon which needed a case.The case only covers half the board because you need access to the connectors on the bottom.

The dragon is etched and filled with silver crayon. The drawing was based on a public domain drawing from Wikipedia (unfortunately I can’t remember what drawing now) and edited in Inkscape.

I used the schematics for the board to place a hole for the USB port as well as holes in the base to line up with holes in the board.

What’s a laser without a shark?

I can’t take credit for this one – one of my think|haus friends brought it in though I don’t remember who.

think|haus laser with mandatory shark