Final Fun, DIY Design and Fabrication
Fall 2021

Target Audience and Inspiration

The project for this class was very open ended but it was mentioned that gifts are often chosen an with the holidays coming, I decided to make a puzzle with Oreo who was my cousins' (really our whole family's) dog to make with friends and family.

My target audience was family and friends. My family and I used to make puzzles together all the time when we younger but hadn't in awhile so I thought that this would be a fun thing to do together over the winter holidays especially with a picture of everyone's favorite dog as what we were putting together. I also wanted to be able to do this with friends as I knew it would be something we'd all enjoy; all of them have seen a ton of pictures and know all about Oreo if they didn't get the chance to meet her. By coincidence a few of us did get really into puzzles again just as I was starting this project. One of these puzzles had what were called "whimsical" pieces which inspired my more interesting shapes. I was between 2 pictures so asked and got a unanimous answer to use the one of Oreo in a stroller. For fabrication, I knew that engraving and cutting the pieces would work well after tuning the settings.

Creating the puzzle pieces

I wanted this puzzle to be fun, interesting, and at least somewhat hard. Because of this, I chose to create all the pieces without using a template. I made the whole thing as sketches in SolidWorks. Based off the wood size available and the proportions of the picture, I made a 9.51"x12" rectangle and then split it up with construction lines to make 1.5" squares with the edges being bigger for size reference. I tried to make the pieces all pretty unique. The shapes I created were either traced over a picture with splines and lines or made freehand with the sketch tools and were made first. The rest of the puzzle pieces were made with lines and arcs. I overall tried to make the puzzle a bit harder by making more flat sections, not using many of the same arc sizes, and making multiple triangle slots so that fits were less obvious. In the end there were between 50 and 60 pieces in both puzzles.

Creating an engrave-able picture and puzzle pieces that fit together

The first step for creating an engrave-able picture was converting it to grayscale and bitmap format. I then changed the size proportionally so that it would fit on the 12"x12"x1/8" wood available. After that, I tested the engraving at a quarter scale on the Rabbit laser cutters. I knew that I wanted to cut on there as they are much better than the Epilogs, so was hoping that it would engrave well. I first tried the recommended settings and adjusted the power and speed from there. After the 1st attempt, I went to 1/8 scale as it would take much too long otherwise. Even after just 2, I learned that I needed to use the Epilog laser cutters so that the engraving would actually look like a picture; these 2 can be seen in the second image. I also used Corel Photo-Paint to adjust the contrast in the picture to try and ensure Oreo's eyes and fur wouldn't simply be black blobs. I did this a few times and then also used halftone to try and further adjust the photo. At the same time, I was adjusting the power and speed as well as the dpi settings. I sometimes stopped engraves part-way through and tried with different setting when it wasn't looking promising; my final settings are shown in the bottom left image. The best 2 engraves are shown in the last image and I knew at full scale it would look even better. There are 2 because as I'll go more into later, the laser cutter had glitched partway and before I redid it full-scale I wanted to test the laser cutter.

Cutting puzzle pieces that fit was overall much easier. I started with the Epilog Helix since that's where I was able to engrave the picture, but this was not nearly good enough. Even with the power up to 100 and the speed as slow as reasonable, it took 4 passes to cut out and they fit awfully-I threw them out before getting a picture.The Rabbit cut it out very easily with the recommended settings and tried a few options before finding the best. I cut on the first engraved image as it was biggest and to see how it would look when I manually set the origin for an engraved picture.

Putting it all together

Marker rendering of final grip to practice the skills

For the final puzzle, I engraved on the Epilog Helix with the image and setting that worked best at full scale. This takes almost an hour with stopping for a little bit every 5-10 minutes to let the the smoke clear and cleaning the lens during some of these breaks. The first video shows a snippet when the engraving is about 80% done and is actually right before the laser cutter glitched by the 0 in the x position somehow shifting left half an inch or so. I hadn't noticed right away and so hadn't stopped it right away. I engraved the rest from the top down to see how it would look and there was a dark band. I knew I wanted to engrave another because of this, but cut it out so that on the the Rabbit laser cutter anyway so that I could physically see and feel the fit and size of the ones I made. The Rabbit does operations mirrored and instead of flipping my puzzle in RDWorks, I chose to flip the wood itself so that the burn marks would be on the blank side. I liked it for the most part but some of the pieces were a bit big for my liking so for the final one I split them up further. The second video shows the beginning of the second puzzle being cut.

Having 2 puzzles because of this works out well though because my family is pretty competitive. When we make the puzzle together now it can be a competition with one team on each puzzle similar to our gingerbread house competitions.

I hadn't noticed until taking final pictures, but there were black smudges on the puzzles either from being flipped on the laser cutter or from the surfaces they were put on. I did my best to scrub them off with a damp paper towel and then picked off the disintegrated pieces afterwards.

Final Product

Overall I'm very happy with how this came out. I was lucky enough to be able to have a blast making this with friends over Thanksgiving and am looking forward to doing so with family on Christmas. I've got them wrapped like presents already:)

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