Household Laser Cuts

#1

Post by evakhoury » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

Household Laser Cuts
cceckman.com

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#2

Post by zacharycohn » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

Calculating kerf is the worst. :(

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#3

Post by seemaze » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

I've had great success designing durable objects using the sheet metal modeler in OnShape[0] and have them fabricated with SendCutSend[1]

[0]www.onshape.com [1]www.sendcutsend.com

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#4

Post by dofm » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

There is a FreeCAD workbench for this, and it seems to have been restarted recently:

https://github.com/execuc/LCInterlocking

Like some of the other older pre-TNP-mitigation plugins it's possible its interaction with those mitigations is quite limited, though my limited understanding is some work has gone into extending the mitigations into objects generated by the Python API in the next version of FreeCAD (26.3 — CalVer now).

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#5

Post by giarc » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

zacharycohn wrote: post #2

Calculating kerf is the worst. :(

Can you not just cut a 1" square, measure it accurately then use that as the kerf correction (option to add in software like Lightburn).

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#6

Post by kennywinker » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

Before you go deep on OpenSCAD, consider JSCAD: https://jscad.app/

Roughly similar capabilities, but you get to use javascript or typescript instead of the linguistic abomination that is OpenSCAD.

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#7

Post by WillAdams » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

For more on this in spades see boxes.py

https://boxes.hackerspace-bamberg.de/

For my part, I've been working the CNC router angle, so have a much larger kerf to cope with (and the added advantage of controllable partial depth and no char):

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/full-blind-box-joints-in-c...

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#8

Post by WillAdams » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #6

Before you go deep on OpenSCAD, consider JSCAD: https://jscad.app/ Roughly similar capabilities, but you get to use javascript or typescript instead of the linguistic abomination that is OpenSCAD.

I'm actually rather fond of OpenSCAD --- it has the advantage of being completely safe in terms of security/execution, so no worries about downloading a random .scad file and wondering what it might do.

If one wants a full-fledge programming language for this, I found Python a lot more comfortable:

https://pythonscad.org/

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#9

Post by catchmeifyoucan » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

I found that Figma is really good for designing SVG laser cuttable designs. Had to fix a few things with exports, units etc. but solid. Here's a little plugin I built if it's helpful:

https://www.heyraviteja.com/post/portfolio/laser-cuts/

Re: Household Laser Cuts

#10

Post by thomascountz » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

Can anyone recommend a home CO2 or high-wattage diode laser cutter which can cut 3-4mm ply? We run an Epilog machine at my local makerspace, but I wonder if consumer machines have gotten reasonably good recently?