Laser Heaven
Following the events of yesterday, I think the only way a person can experience true bliss is by designing and then printing a diorama. The “design” part is the journey. It is grueling, tough, and an educational experience that is all leading up to the printing. The entire time you are thinking, “Will this be enough? Will the laser burn up the paper? Will all my effort go to waste?” and several other stressful thoughts. However the moment that laser starts cutting, you know you’re going to have a perfectly printed paper. This is exactly what happened with my printing experience. Scared that not even the temple layer would cut out properly, I did a test run with plain cardstock to see if it would work. At first we had put the laser thickness way too low at 0.02 inches of cutting power, and this meant that the laser wasn’t cutting through some parts of the paper. So mid-cut we changed it to 0.03 inches and then restarted the cut. After the laser finished it came out looking really good, and finally I was ready to begin. Each and every layer had no problem cutting, especially the water trapezoid, which finished in under 4 seconds. After everything was printed, I stood back and admired my beautiful work. However I now had to go on to the frustrating part of the day, which was cutting out foam slits with an exacto knife. Unbeknownst to me, I was using a quite dull blade, and this meant that my first ten cuts were absolutely abysmal, but then I got a new blade and everything was alright. Since I had 7 layers, I was going to need 28 slits. Each slit was 10 inches long, but I needed 14 that were 8 inches and 14 that were 7.5 inches. So then I had to cut them all again, and then I could start gluing them together. This was a very frustrating process, since the slits weren’t all the very exact thanks to my cutting skills. I managed to put down 8 slits, but by the time I had glued down the third layer the day was already over.
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