Laser Cut "Turtle City" art piece finished.

Aspidochelone is Aspidoche-Done!

This weekend, I finished the "Turtle City" piece of art I was working on. It's called "aspidochelone", after the ancient myth (google it).

Here are some pictures.

This is the drawing of the original idea.

Here it is completed:

Here are some close-ups of various parts:

The city:

Close-up of some of the buildings:

The shell:

The head:

The overall size of the piece is slightly less than 3 feet across by about 4.5 feet tall.   Pictures don't do it justice.

Laser-Cut Gumball Machine

I wanted to make something I've not seen before: a laser-cut gumball machine.

So here is what I came up with:

You turn the big gear and gumballs pop out of the bottom.  

The bottom is MDF that I treated with beeswax to make it food-safe.   The top is acrylic.   My wife suggested I make the next one completely in acrylic so you can see the mechanism as it works.

I took some videos of the design process, and I'll post them once I've had time to edit them together into one big video.

Laser Cut Game Terrain - Industrial Finished

I cut the final parts of my "Industrial Game Terrain" on the weekend.   I also cut one of the "hangars" to see how well it works.   The hangar connects to the terrain with a bridge either on the side or the back of the hangar.     Here are some pictures.

I have a couple more hangars to cut, but they will have to wait a while.   The library where I'm using the laser-cutter is shutting down it's maker space for a few months to renovate it.

So I'll be doing a lot less cutting, and a lot more design in the upcoming weeks.   I still have a few sessions left, but I want to cut "turtle city" first.

Laser-Cut City Art

I've completely finished cutting the cityscape art piece.   It is 99% glued up and assembled.   I have about 15 screws left to put in place, and then I have to figure out how to hang it on the wall.  

Here are some pics of it laying on my ping-pong table.

I took some close-ups of some of the buildings as well.

Once it's on the wall, I'll take some more pictures.

Cut files for "Turtle City"

This is what the cut files look like once I've split all the turtle layers into parts that fit on a 24x12 inch bed.

There are 28 sheets that will need to be cut.   Looks like I have another long wait at the laser-cutter coming up.

Turtle City - model finished

I finished modeling my "turtle city" piece in SketchUp.  

It's 11 layers of 1/8 in thick material.   I've got a view of all the layers in the next image.   It's a little hard to see because the buildings in each layer are fairly elaborate.

The turtle is about 3' wide, so the whole piece is about 5' tall.

The next step is to make cut files from this model, which will be a challenge, since my cut bed is only 24x12.