Hello. I am getting the hang of LB. I am watching the training videos, but I am also doing projects so I learn. I haven’t watch all the videos yet, but m going to ask a diagnostic question. See the pic of what I have burned and my .lbrn file. It may be hard to see, but when the Thunder cuts the vertical lines in the bricks, they are not cut all the way from the bottom to top line. I found this out when I tried to paint the cut and can see gaps in the burn. Is this something really technical I have to do in LB or is this something with the Thunder laser? The longer stones or the outline seems to cut though fine. My power and speed setting at all the same.
I don’t know the grid function yet. I watched someone do it at my makerspace. I just drew a brick and used the grid function to duplicated it via the x and y coordinates. Being new, when I going back to edit the grid and make it longer and larger, I wasn’t given the option so I did a lot of copying and pasting. I did this to get and idea of what I was trying to make and also get a hang of this laser. That may be why you are seeing a lot of lines down there. So a lot of grid making, pasting and the final line was an attempt at joining polygons to make an L to cut out the shape. I also threw in a vector image of a manhole cover to see what it would look like.
I will read that article. I am working in O scale, and as I learn LB better, I am going to build cobblestone to scale. I am burning to some leftover (art store purchased) MDF in the makerspace for trial and error. I am going to buy material when I have this the way I want it. I may even use 1/4 inch poplar, because I use water soluble paints and dyes. Anyway, when I get my dimemsions and and build drawn up, I am going to experiment with materials. Just wasn’t sure if I was doing anything wrong.
How did you draw your bricks? I have to get cobblestones 18" long and about 4.5" tall to fit my O scale layout. I drew this in about 5 min via the array function. It is three shapes. Is this how you do it? If this works, I will start to design to scale and try a burn? When I get this, then I am going to read deeper into how you burned your bricks to solve my “horizontal line” issue. sidewalk v5.lbrn2 (338.3 KB)
The same way you did: draw one brick, then use the Array tool to create the rest of the plank.
Remember to set Cut Optimization to remove overlapping lines and cut the total time in half.
You could create a larger rectangular area and subtract away sections you don’t want, which might be easier than aligning separate sections. But, heck, real brick walks have weird joints, so … whatever works!
The other way to do it, which might be faster, is to create a bitmap image, then engrave the whole thing in one shot to get a uniform exposure on both horizontal and vertical lines:
Creating the image is a bit fussier, because GIMP doesn’t have an array tool, but it wasn’t too awful.
