The blueprints

Quick introduction

The easiest way to get the whole mechanism to work, is to just use Ponoko (or any other laser cutting service), send them the blueprints, get back the pieces and assemble it. Of course, this path is also quite pricey. I got a nice discount for holiday season, but it is still the big item in our bill (many times more expensive than all the other materials combined).

How to order from Ponoko:

1. Go to their site and create an account.
2. Go to My Designs -> Add design -> Upload your design and choose one of the blueprints
3. Wait for it to upload and then click Add Material
4. Select Wood, MDF Natural, 3.2mm and size P1 for one_character.svg or size P3 for both parts of nine_characters
5. Click Add this material
6. Click Make it!

Which design should I choose?

If you go to the blueprints folder you can see that we have 3 files. The one called one_character has the blueprints to create the mechanism for one letter only, over a board of size P1. The other two files, are the components required to create nine letters, that are spread across two P3 boards. Depending on the amount of letters you want to create (and probably how much do you want to spend), you can choose one or the other.

It is possible to create different blueprints in order to make an intermediate amount of letters, or even to create the same amount but cheaper. You can see details on this on the section take a look at the blueprints

Taking a look at the blueprints (can totally skip this):

The editor

1. Download and install Inkscape from here
2. Run Inkscape and open one of the files in the blueprints folder.
3. Go to View -> Display Mode -> Outline (if not, you are not going to see anything, it will just look like an empty file)

There you can see the blueprints. If you want to do super-simple stuff, you can use it as if was paint, and copy and paste stuff around, move the boxes, resize, etc. If you are more of a pro, you will see it has some commands similar to Autocad or Catia.

I want to create my own blueprint, for X amount of letters

1. Download the template from the Ponoko site with the size you are looking at (P1, P2 or P3) and open it on Inkscape
2. On another Inkscape window, open the blueprint for one_character
3. Drag your mouse to select all the parts in the design
4. Copy it and then paste it on the template you downloaded from Ponoko
5. Paste as many copies as letters you would like to have
6. Arrange all the shapes inside the box, in order to have them in your board. (if they don't fit, use a bigger template!) Please don't resize them!

Laser cutting dynamics

To order from Ponoko they ask you to copy and paste your design into one of the templates you download from their page, that have the size of the MDF board they are going to cut.

Once you upload the blueprints, you get an automatic quote on the price of making the pieces. That price is determined by a couple of different factors:

1. The price of the board that is being cut. This depends on the material (we are using MDF 3.2mm) and the size (P1, P2 or P3)
2. The time taken to cut it. This will be determined by:
   1. The number of lines.
   2. The angles on your shapes.
3. Shipping cost (this can get quite high!)

This means that a board with 10 straight lines will be more expensive than one with 4, a straight line will be cheaper than a dotted line, and some shapes with a lot of turns can be pricey. For example a gear, that is basically a rounded squiggly line, will take a lot of time. In many cases when you have something like that, you can make it cheaper by reducing the amount of teeth (and thus, having less lines), or having softer edges (and avoiding excessive sharp turns that slow down the laser).

Making your design cheaper

A good technique to make designs cheaper is to reuse the lines you are cutting. In order to do this, you just get your pieces close together so that they touch and share some of the borders. With this, you will reduce the number of lines, along with your price.

I didn't do this over the blueprints, because I'm quite new in this, and didn't have enough time to focus on it.

If you want to go this way, there are some guides on Ponoko on how to reduce the cost of your design, and how to share the edges.

Important: If you get two shapes and put them one next to the other, you have to make sure that you don't have duplicate lines (your design will get rejected if it has them). If you search online, there are a many posts addressing this issue.