Mr. Cola is a partner and senior designer for his smart product design engineering firm (aka, really smart dude!). Because of this, we have access to lots of neat gadgets and machines that most of you probably have never even heard of before. Enter the magical laser cutter! This is about a $35k machine that cuts material in layers with a super hot laser. I have plans to use it for several projects, but for now, we've only used it to make rubber stamps.
I ordered 2 8.5x11 sheets of rubber from laserbits.com, for $9.98 each. We then went into Mr. Cola's office on a Saturday with my two designs and the rubber. I made one design that is the vine motif from the wedding party invites, and one with our address on it. These will be used to decorate our envelopes for our STDs and invites. When you make a design for a rubber stamp, you have to provide the inverse of the image you're trying to create, since you're actually cutting out the parts that won't be stamped.
So now, don'tcha wanna see the laser in action?
Where you see the white light is the laser cutting into the rubber, and not lit spots are where it leaves the rubber for the stamp:
The finished address stamp (excuse the edits for privacy):
{All pics taken by me}And here is a video of the laser cutter in action!
After all the exciting cutting was done, we mounted the rubber onto pieces of acrylic that Mr. Cola had lying around the shop. So my total cost was only for the rubber, and we still have about 3/4ths of it left for future projects!
Did you use any unusual gadgets or machines for your wedding DIY projects?
Posts
I've been going back through some of your old projects, and I'm again...super jealous of your laser cutter access!!! That's amazing =]
ReplyDelete