Three at Once

If you’ve got a third machine that can make stuff, you really need to get all three machines working at once. So, on New Year’s Day, I revved up the two 3D printers, printing parts for the upcoming steam throttle project. While they were happily layering away, I fired up the laser cutter to make […]

Two New Materials for the Laser

While XTool has an extensive catalogue of suggested settings for their laser, they don’t appear to agree with me on the selection of materials. So, I designed a quick matrix of power and speed settings to help find the optimal setting for new materials. 100 small squares increment either the power or the speed in […]

XTool Finds a Home

While I’m optimistic that the XTool is going to be fabulously useful, it also takes almost as much space as a third child. Although it is less than 24×24 inches, that is still almost .25 percent of our home’s floor space. I had to consider where it would live before I even pushed the “buy” […]

XTool first cut

Like every cool toy they advertised when I was a kid, the new laser cutter came “some assembly required.” It took a few days to reach the top of the to-do list, and when it did, the straightforward task took a good hour or more. Strangely, the instructions get you to the point of downloading […]

Another new tool

A huge box just landed on the front doorstep, and inside was my “Congratulations on your new job and on selling that Lego” gift to myself. It’s an XTool D10 laser engraver; it should be powerful-enough to cut 1/4″ plywood, but I’ll probably cut a lot more board and 1/8″ ply. Stand back! And here: […]