Keychain

The original picture

For the original picture, I used a picture of my cat laying down. I thought that this would be a simple and easy to recognize shape without any breakable points allowing for a strong keychain.

Cut and engrave lines

I made it on a 3x3 artboard in Adobe illustrator and traced my original image filling in details that were important. I then was left with what was in the picture: an outline and lines for everything that was going to be cut or engraved. Lines that will cut through have to be .001 inches thick but engraving lines can be anything thicker, this shows the machine what to do with each line.

The Sticker

Next to make the sticker I took the original picture used the outline of the cut and mirrored it to get the back side of the key chain. This made it fit perfectly on the keychain because it was the same size.

Fusionpro Laser Cutter

Roland Sticker Printer

For this project, I used a Fusionpro laser cutter to cut out and engrave the front side of my keychain and a Roland sticker printer for the sticker on the back. The laser cutter used a 1/8 inch wood from Liberty Puzzles and the Sticker printer used sticker sheets.

First try

On my first cut the laser wasn't warmed up and didn't engrave most of the lines and the ones it did were very lite.

Second try

I then scaled the keychain up a little bit hoping there might be more detail and recut it. The second try it worked very well and cut and engraved how I wanted it.

The sticker

After Cutting the keychain I printed the sticker for the back. My first try printing the sticker failed because I forgot to put cut lines. For the machine to cut, the line must be the magenta color from the Roland color library, showing the machine what to cut. I forgot to change the color so it never cut the sticker out, but on my second try it worked perfectly and I was able to apply it with little effort.

Final Keychain

Finaly after putting the the ring on I put it on my backpack

I found durimg this project my laser cut and design worked in the end, even on my second try it looked how I wanted it to and you could tell it was a cat even without the sitcker.

Even though my final product you could tell it was a cat I found it very challenging to get it to look like a cat. The original picture had lots of lines and really depended on the black and white to tell what it was, but after a long time trying different things I got it to look how I wanted and so you could tell it was a cat.

If I were to do this project again I wouldmove the key chain hole to a different place, I think it is pretty weak right there and could break with the grain of the wood.

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