Choose one of the recommended materials and demonstrate it

Volunteers Needed High-Value Limited-Time Projects ANYONE Can Do
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Choose one of the seven recommended materials listed on the wiki, and remove mystery from it.

Your audience is a person who pays full freight membership so they can come in on their one free day each month. It has been thirty days since they took the laser class, and wow it all seemed so clear back then. You will help guarantee that after 1.5hrs bafflement, 15 minutes creating a project for the trash can, and 15 minutes of cutting, they will achieve victory. The subtasks:

  • Follow up to this post to claim one or two of the materials from the list.

  • Using that exact material, make something small and interesting or useful. If nothing better comes to mind, a box will do fine.

  • Using that exact material, engrave a test pattern naming the material and showing the exact lightburn settings for cutting; the settings for engraving; and the settings for line drawing, along with what the work looks like using those settings. For glass it may make sense to also print the settings onto a piece of ply it it’s not well readable

  • In a dedicated folder on the machine, save the lightburn file for that project, and the lightburn file for the test pattern, each named for the material you’ve claimed.

You’ve turned the complexity of the laser and all of lightburn into these steps:

  1. Open the test file in lightburn
  2. fixture your work
  3. set Z and origin
  4. Hit “frame” to sanity check the path
  5. Hit print
  6. Victory!
  7. Repeat the process for the demonstration file, or go run wild in the glory of makerhood.
    7.5 Most importantly: if the test card you made doesn’t reasonably match the test card you see on the wall, four things are true: there is a problem; you didn’t cause the problem; there are people who will solve the problem with you; it’s not worth proceeding alone.

For mirrored glass, please choose one part number in Lowe’s catalog, doesn’t matter if any mirror in the world would also be fine. Choose one part number, make a thing with that part number, and then nobody has extra questions they don’t need.

Please resist the urge to demonstrate all the wonderful things that one might do with the material. That would also be cool as a separate project, yes please, but the most high value contribution is a decision-free complexity-free lighted path to success.

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