RockyAussie

Nothin more than you can see here theraputic ?? comes later

People on this here forum would chuck me off if they see how I sharpen it ...but it does take less than a minute and doing a hundred at a time I only need to polish it on the rag wheel maybe 2 sometimes 3 times.

Your welcome

Is that how they make them dreadlocks?

No, I believe as you do that there is an unacceptable risk with it being open as it is and is one of the reasons that I have made the big one in the box shape I have. I had ordered before Christmas black acrylic sheeting cut to size for it but unfortunately they did not get it done and I will have to wait a couple of more weeks now before they get back to work. This will also act to keep the structure more square and rigid. Fans,extractors, Z axis lifters, bigger diode lasers are all on the drawing board yet to do.

Pretty low and depends on the leather type ...mostly I go at about 1/2mm at a time but I have accidental cut through about 2mm in about a second before I realised it was not moving. If you turn it on without the safety button on, it starts at full power if it is not being controlled by from the computer program.You can set it in the program to do how ever many passes you like. I am playing around with a 5 watt one at the moment that cost me just over a hundred and it burnt a hole in a 3 ply cardboard box about 12" away before I even realised it. That was a shock and a fast learning lesson.

Here's a couple of pictures of the prints...note: the mounting block around the motor to the cable chain and the piece that alows you to slide along the channel to get the chain positioned perfectly. e Below a couple of simple little corner block holders that allow the control board to be held and slide positioned into place.

Keep a look out as I already discovered way more uses than I every thought to start with and that new printer of yours would come in handy on making one for yourself. I printed up several pieces in the big one I am making like the cable chain holders and some corner fittings and that helps keep the cost way down. I am hoping to try it out on cutting some 3mm black acrylic soon as I believe that is possible.

After finding out as much as I could about lasers and their practical uses with leather I decided to go with a small diode laser. This video is the first in a series I hope to share with you as I go in finding ways and developing methods and improvements related to leather working and laser. Many reasons along with cost led me to go with the small diode laser to start with and I can honestly say I have been surprised and delighted on my findings so far. The CO2 lasers that at first looked so tempting lost their gleam when I discovered that the tubes that they come with will often fail within 6 months or less and a good quality honestly branded Reci tube will likely cost around a $1000 or more. Another finding is that the small dot of a 2500mw laser gives excellent detail for fine engraving (burning in) and along with a program called 2T Laser it is possible to get a dxf file once done in a decent Cad program to cut with different power and time settings all in the one file. I have had some success with cutting leather be that it takes several passes but for my prototyping work that is now a major time saver. Even the little one shown here can be moved around over the top of a whole hide if you wanted to do it in sections or as can be seen later a very large version I am working on can do larger than poster size and all for a few hundred dollars. (So far). Watch it and comment and follow if your interested to see more.

Your welcome. I wish I had thought of it several thousand straps back though My wife agrees on the simple part at least .....as far as I go anyways

@BlakesBlades No, I have not had any slipping problems that have allowed the leather to scratch. A light layer of latex glue on the underside might be a further improvement though.

Recently I came up with an improved method for straightening up leather before being cut into strap lengths. This is a short video that I hope some of you may find useful until something better comes along.

Pictures and notes being taken as I go and still a ways to go ho ho. The Al Paker one is again one of the staffs ideas who is into them. She actually go me to do an AlPaker onto a stubby cooler(drink cosy) with the laser for her son. The wife was lucky to pick up some heavy drill type fabric with that design on it and the rest you can now see. The next one in from the left is for another staffs girlfriend who is a .........vegan so it is vinyl.

Dragonfly, and not my drawing design just cleaned up for the laser work. It is for a bag made up for one of my staff along with a few others for Christmas. She provided the drawing she wanted and was happy with the result.

Here for what its worth is my trusty old prusa i3. Main mods I can think of are Saddles at the base to help keep steady....Threaded rods at back to keep gantry from the vibration movements.......Heavy wooden base to dampen vibration.....cork under the heated plate to keep better heat distribution. Fan at the side is just to cool off the job quicker when the job is finished to help get the job off the glass faster. The original glass got tooo scratched so I replaced it with a piece of mirror I cut to shape and it been in use for over a year and is still fine. I have another one slowly being made but I am working on a large 2.5watt laser project at the moment which I hope to get going this week sometime. Pic below ...will do a separate post showing how it can be used for making my product boxing with fold lines among other things like cutting leather etc. Merry Christmas

I tend to agree with @Dwight with regards to longevity. All of the bikes I've had that I can remember had a rubber strap to keep the battery snug in place and if I had too I would go with the upholstery leather doubled back to a seam in the middle fully contact glued and probably not stitched along the length. This would at least allow some elasticity to the strap to hold the battery tight.

I am not sure if this is of use but here are some pictures of some flexible plastic that has an excellent memory for springing back into shape. I just buy the binders from an office supply place when I occasionally need them. As you can see they work well for holding the shape and they last for ever. Merry Christmas to you and family. Regards Brian

Nice effort and the colouring looks good as well. Merry Christmas to you all.

I did not like the look of the movement of the needle once located in the shaft so I would check that the needle is pretty close to 2mm dia at the top first. I just checked a needle in my old 69 and that takes 2mm fairly snug. As for the line up forget the feet and line up the needle in the centre of your dog foot which in your first picture looks about right.The KH foot is off set I think and you may want to open the hole right through at the left side of the front foot and consider that it will be easier and quicker to thread up as your old one was from the other side. May need to shave a little of the right side while your at it to allow more clearance from the back foot on the right.

I think it sould work fine. I have been using a light dimmer switch housed into a wooden box and a cresent soldering iron with various self shaped tips for over 20 years now and way before I ever heard about these fancy regad heat creases. These Robotemp boxes look nicer though.

Thanks @noobleather I used some overpriced spray paint for shoes at first but the clear finish wrinkled it up so I then resorted to using my old edging colours. They are a little exotic I guess because I sort of make them myself from a mixture of clear Ares AR 6350 ( you can get it from Texon in Melbourne) and many in the other countries will have it branded Fenice AR 6350. I use 90% clear AR6350 to 10% liquid pigments that I have previously bought from Clarient. You may have to replace that with the Stahl waterbase pigments that can be bought in smaller quantities. As to the guide ...its a bitch to adjust when you are adjusting the back and the top at the same time and you are looking for less than a 1/2mm line up. I decided to super glue the back to be a permanent 38mm(1 1/2") and that leaves me free to adjust the top only. If your not concerned about double line ups its good. Price I think would be $30.00 plus post ($11.00 express in Australia). If you want the stl file to print it let me know in a PM or I can print it for you. Regards Brain

Mike is dead right on that I reckon but although the end result is not really to my taste .....The pics show a pretty professional finish I think. Tape peels out nice A bit of a roll to make sure no edgesare sticking up Yeah it looks like shi...t oh so blue Painting is done A bit of pressure And its looks a lot better.....? The $300 2.5 watt Eleksmaker laser getting another $200+ resize with bigger rails. This will allow me to do a full belt in one go and is wide enough to do a large poster size which means I can now cut out my product boxing from full size sheets and I can get several boxes cutting at the same time. More to come on that later.

I thought about that but there is a lot of steps like making my own font for it and then the doing the font file for the outside 3d print and files for the laser cutting and settings and I just thought I would test the interest levels before I spent more hours trying to explain it all. So far very little interest I have seen so I will think about some more. I will dig back and find an earlier post where I started this project as it shows a few more of the steps involved -

Hey Brian, thanks for the trouble. I thought I was going to be able to use the Saddlebag font shown below by @Bigjake80 (Thanks Bigjake) but on checking on what claimed to be Free to use on some font site, Deiter Steffmanns page appears to say otherwise. I decided that it would not help much with what I wanted to do between laser files and 3d print files etc so I decided to make my own. THAT took a lot of learning and time and mistakes I can assure you. I hope to come up with a metal set of letters for my font in the near future. The advantage is I can type it out to show a customer and then laser cut the outline if I want or just place the letters against each other and stamp out the words. Thanks for your input on this point @LatigoAmigo. After a LOT of playing with the letter style and spacings between each letter I have come up with a font that seems to work well with most every thing I have thrown at it so far. (still early days yet though) There is no kerning in my font only the same spacings between which is just over 3mm apart. I have copyrighted this font and hope to put it out there when I finish getting the metal stamps for it finished. Example below shows the laser cut masking tape on a trial. This pic below shows the impression possible with a 3D printed block I did with this font This next one shows that the guide I printed can use the Ivan letter set as well, in this case a C and can give a cleaner looking impression. If a font for the Ivan set were available I think it would be too sharp to get a good line up over the masking tape and is also why I decided to make the width/thickness I did when I designed the font. Thank you again for the help you have offered and again to Rockoboy and Bigjake.

Ok I did it