Fab Lab Makers Pumpkin Carving
The plan for today had been to make some halloween decorations using the vinyl cutter, 3D printer, and Epilog. Instead, having been inspired by a question from one of our participants, we decided to try carving a pumpkin with the Epilog. We used medium sized pie pumpkins so that they would actually fit in theepilog. Our first attempt was using a bumpier, more traditional looking pumpkin. It got stuck and slipped couple of times so we cancelled the print. Our second pumpkin had a much smoother, more rounded outside. That combined with moving the rollers closer together made for a much smoother rotation.
For the rastering we set the power at 100%, the speed at 20%, and the frequency at 5,000. This peeled theouter skin of the pumpkin off quite nicely, but light does not shine through very well because the walls are so thick. Pie pumpkins are so small that it is hard to cut the top large enough to get your hands in for good scraping. Perhaps slowing the speed down a little more would have made the pumpkin wall thin enough from the outside to get a good glow.
For the vectoring we set the power at 100%, the speed at 5%, and the frequency at 5,000. This created a very black line that looks really cool, but only went about 2/3 of the way through the pumpkin. I had hoped that maybe the lines would glow when the candle was placed in the pumpkin, but it is such a thin line that you do not get any glowing at all. Though you can see the outline pretty nicely when the pumpkin is glowing orange around it. Since we had quit the print on our first pumpkin, we still had room on it and decided to try some different settings for the vectoring. We changed the speed to 2% and the frequency to 500. By leaving the rollers close together we were able to overcome the sticking and slipping during rotation. This time the laser cut about 98 to 99% of the way through the pumpkin. Still no glow when the candle is lit, but it looks pretty groovy.
