These figures were my main focus for about 4 years. I started off the plan of making them with a wood core and laminated printed pages on each side so each was ~3.2mm thick. However I quickly found that the manufacturing became much simpler by instead doing a very careful calibration with a duplex printer was far more scalable.

The next hurdle was precise alignment of the page inside of the laser cutting machine. The original strategy was to use laser pulses and adjusting the page until the pulse is exactly at the top origin corner. Then once that’s perfect, jog to the far side, pulse again. Next hold the origin corner so it doesn’t move, and rotate the page to make the edge line up with the pulse location. Pulse and adjust until it’s perfect. Jog back to the origin, and from there jog down. If everything was right, when pulsed it will be on the edge. If so back to origin and run the file. And that was soooo much manual labor.

That was unsustainable so I invested in a new controller for the laser that incorporates a machine vision camera. Using registration marks printed on the pages, it can find where the page is in the cutting machine and adjust the location and small rotation of the cut file to automatically align it. And that definitely streamlined the manufacturing work flow.

However, it still took a lot of manual labor because an operator still has to open the machine, remove the cut page, insert the new, start, and then must do the same in 1-2 minutes after the cut finishes. So it’s very difficult to do other things while processing.

Then I learned the most important lesson. If you are using some computer files for business operations, it is very important to have them backed up. I learned that lesson the hard way when my cat decided to climb on the shelf my production hard drive was stored on and said hard drive met the concrete floor with a terminal velocity. I know it was terminal because the data recovery technician informed me the plater was destroyed beyond recovery. Over half of my production files were destroyed in that moment and it would have taken me hundreds of hours of work to rebuild them.

That was the straw that broke the businesses back. I closed down shop but have always thought about starting it back up. The main hurdle would be automating the entire cutting process with a machine that can move the new page in, trigger the machine to run, move the cut page out, and load in the next to continue. That is one of the reach goals for my current senior design capstone project.