Laser cut cable tidy

Projects
1

@florian has designed us a very swish laser cut cable tidy for the back of the space door.

laser_cut_cable_tidy_1.jpeg1936Ă—2592 1.08 MB

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2

Installation of the cable tidy on the space door.

laser_cut_cable_tidy_2.1.jpeg1936Ă—2592 1.59 MB
laser_cut_cable_tidy_3.jpeg2592Ă—1936 1.61 MB

2 Likes
3

Neat! I like it :slight_smile: What material was used and how long did it take to cut?

4

3 layers were cut from 3mm ply and glued together, I think cutting time was around 10 mins a layer.

5

Very nice :slight_smile: It’s good to have some examples of real world things, and how long they took.

I’m very interested to see if it’s possible to laser material such as this:

Which at 50mm is rather thick! Wonder how the laser would cope, and what would be the outcome of the cut.

6

The thickness isn’t really the problem, it’s the burn characteristics. The “in-focus” length of the laser is actually pretty long, you should be able to get a coherent, <0.5mm cut for several centimetres. The problem is one of power. Foam like that has a very low density compared to wood, so will cut okay, as long as the material is safe and suitable to do so.

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Incidentally, polystyrene-based and polypropylene-based foams are right out. Too burny.

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The above one (and most similar) are ABS, which I think is the glorious cyanide producing one.

Would be nice to make such tool inserts out of a similar, less death-inducing material. :skull_crossbones:

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It’s possible that something like Plastazote would be suitable. Needs some investigation though.

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The precise cutting time was 7:10 min. in 6mm plywood. This is the OPENSCAD that generated the teeth.

module tooth (position, length, width) {
    length_offset = sin(position/285*360)*5;
    half_width = width/2;
    translate([position,0,0]){square(size=[width,length+length_offset-half_width]);
     translate([half_width,length+length_offset-half_width,0])circle(r=half_width);}    
}
narrow_side=240;
narrow_tooth=10;
narrow_gap=5;
for(edge=[-narrow_side:narrow_tooth+narrow_gap:-(narrow_tooth+narrow_gap)]){
    tooth(edge, 40, narrow_tooth);
};
wide_side=230;
wide_tooth=15;
wide_gap=8;
for(edge=[0:wide_tooth+wide_gap:wide_side]){
    tooth(edge, 40, wide_tooth);
};
translate([-narrow_side,-15,0])square(size=[narrow_side+wide_side+wide_tooth,15]);