Laser Cutter

What you need to know to prepare your design for the lasers

Cutting vs Etching

For the laser to cut material, the stroke weight of a path must be set to .1pt (points). A stroke weight of 0 will only define a shape so that it can be filled (no cut, no etch). A stroke weight of .2 or greater will etch.

Remove Duplicate Cut Layers

Extra cut layers (with .1pt paths) will result in the machine cutting the same line multiple times which can mess up your design, put extra wear on the laser, and in some cases cause a fire. You need to make sure there are NO EXTRA CUT LAYERS.

Open Layer panel by going to Window Menu -> Layers
Holding Option (Mac) / Alt (PC) key, click the little "greater than" symbol which will show all layers and sublayers
Using the black arrow, select any cut path (path with a .1pt stroke weight)
Go to the Select Menu -> Same -> Stroke Weight. This will select ALL paths with .1pt stroke weight. In my example below, you can see that this exposes a rogue line that would cut
All layers that were selected will have a small blue dot on the right in the Layer Panel
For each of those dots, click the eyeball on the layer to determine if it's a layer you need, or if it's an unintended or duplicate cut line. In my example, I have the rogue line as well as a complete extra copy of my design.

LC - duplicate-cuts2.mp4

Give the Laser a Break

When possible, we don't want to make the machine do extra work. If you're cutting a shape out that you are going to throw away, try to make the fill white so that the laser doesn't waste time making trash look cool. If it's hard to do that with your design, it's ok to leave it there. Just try to avoid etching designs on to pieces that will be thrown out.

Flipping for Mirrors and Clear / Translucent Material

If you are using mirrored acrylic, you MUST flip your entire design over, then etch and cut from the back of the acrylic. The only exception is that if your design is the same when flipped over.

Bring Cuts to the Front

You'll want to make sure that all cut lines are "on top" of the rastered images. If a raster image is on top of a cut, it will "block" the cut from happening.
If you have Live Paint objects, you will not be able to move the cuts to the front. This is ok as long as you make sure that there is nothing on top of that object like an image that would block the cuts from happening.
For some projects, like the the ICL laser intro project, you may have locked parts of your designs (like the outline of the makercase box). You'll want to unlock those layers so that you can bring those cuts to the front as well.
Select a cut line, go to Select menu -> Same -> Stroke Weight, then go to Object menu -> Arrange -> Bring to Front

Turn Text Objects Into Shapes (when cutting text)

You will need to turn any text objects that will be cuts in your design in shapes. Once you do that, you will not be able to edit the text anymore unless you recreate the text object.

There are a couple of ways to do this, but one of the easiest is to click the black arrow, then right-click (Ctrl-click on Mac) on the text object and choose "Create Outlines."

Report abuse