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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

The diagram of the center spreader piece doesn't make any sense without context. Are the four pieces glued in place? Is there a tab that isn't visible in the picture which allows it to be sandwiched between the other two pieces?

What materials? Is there a cad save file for cutting it ourselves?

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Agreed it is confusing, the JPEG "is" the CAD file (although there is a DXF file as well) but laser cutters will often use a JPEG as the profile image.

Here is my guess, you laser it out of acrylic, you slot the two large parts together to form an 'X' (looking down from the top) and you glue in the four wedges using solvent glue to stabilize the X shape of the two pieces.

> laser cutters will often use a JPEG as the profile image.

Laser cutter operator here. Never heard of laser cutter, plasma cutter, or oxy cutter (our company has all three) accepting a JPG as the input file. I've spoken to two other local operators and they all require a DXF / DWG or some other type of NC (Numeric Code) file as input.

I'm guessing it's a reference to GlowForge, which can cut based on pictures or drawings on the material itself.

And a bunch of the inexpensive Chinese laser cutters, some of which provided a pirated copy of Corel Draw to do your designs in.

CorelDRAW is a vectors graphics program.

I often use Inkscape for text I'm going to laser cut because it does a proper job of creating text outlines compared with Draftsight which manages to bork the text when I run explodetext command.

What I don't understand using a vector graphics program to generate CNC cut items is how do you specify dimensions? CAD files have dimensionality inherent.

How does that aspect work?

The Glowforge will only engrave from a bitmap. You need a vector to do cutting.

Ah, right, thanks, wasn't aware of that.

AFAIK Ponoko just uses the line widths to indicate cuts vs etching. they provide an Inkscape template but I don't think it's required so long as the line widths are right.

Of the 3, which is your favorite?

Which is daft because you can just cut another slot and shove a bit in at an angle to lock it — no glue needed. Also the CAD is useless unless you have the exact thickness of material to laser cut since you can't adjust the cut width. This could easily have been a clever script to generate an SVG to match your material thickness and laptop dimensions.

This is submission is well below the bar for what I usually see on HN.

People will post any old drek for karma & downvote anyone who questions the frontpage algorithm's objective rightness at displaying only the hackerest articles.

Wow, you’re right. Downvotes because someone uploaded a poor laser cut design to GitHub instead of thingyverse.

I meant the opposite, I agree with you.

If they had used an STL[0] instead of a JPG then I think people would have liked it.

0: https://help.github.com/articles/3d-file-viewer/

Yes if the two halves had matching horizontal slots forming T's with the vertical slots, the whole thing would lock together with friction. That's a pretty obvious improvement.

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