Mother's Day 2024
Posted on: May 14th, 2024 4 minute read
Introduction
Hi yall. To destress for my AP exam tommorow I'm gonna be making my belated mothers day post. Usually, I don't do anything special for mothers day. My father or mother would simply book a fancy restaurant and we'd eat there. That's it. That's mothers day. However this month I guess I had a change of heart. So I made a lasercut plaque out of purpleheart wood to give to my mother.
Why This?
On the plaque there is a picture of me and my mother in a quarantine hotel back in 2021 celebrating my birthday. I thought that was a pretty good memory of me and my mother because it showed that she was always with me in my happiest times, even when stuck in unfortunate situations. The plaque took me a total of approximately 3-4 hours to make. It was designed on adobe illustrator, cut to a 6x4.5" size with a Miter saw, engraved with the A10-960-M120W Laser System, sanded down to 220 grit sandpaper, and finally applied Maloof polyurethane along with SC Johnson Waxed finish. I will go over all steps in production in this blog post starting with the design.
I chose Adobe Illustrator as my medium for design because I found that it had the best method of tracing images. Not only does Adobe Illustrator allow me to edit vectors in a method that I was familiar with, the freedom provided by extensive creative tools provide me with infinite possibilities. This ultimately allowed me to preserve the intricate window details in our school's Tech cube. Many of you may be wondering why I chose to include the tech cube in the first place, seemingly out of place for a mother's day plaque. Well, the reason why I included the tech cube was personal, because my mother has always had a passionate support in my interest for robotics. I felt that the natural consequence would be that she would also like something to remember the distant building with.
Lasercutting
After I had my design prepared in Adobe illustrator, I exported my plaque as a .DXF file. DXF files are common for precision vector based cutting machinery such as lasercutters and waterjets. Users typically have the option to choose between a .dxf and a .ai file. Although .ai files are best for editability, such as if you are outsourcing your manufacturing to an outside business, .dxf files are most compatible with machinery. Taipei American School is NOT a woodworking school. As such the settings for wood were typically tuned for Plywood. I had to make a number of test cuts on Purpleheart, a hardwood, to determine the best engraving settings.
I found that the lasercutter digs far too deeply into the wood, and had to decrease them by a far margin. Ultimately, the settings I optimized for purpleheart engraving are:
.050mm interval, 100 mm/s speed, 4% max power, 2% min power.
After a long 40 minutes of waiting for the engraving to finish I was left with a beautiful plaque. I immediately went off to sand off the edges, back, and carefully did the front, starting from 120 grit down to 220. After the sanding, the finish is ready to be applied.
Applying Finish
I brought the wood piece home to apply the finish. I was careful to hide the project from my mother so that it remained a surprise. It is not recommended to breathe in or touch polyurethane. It's very important to follow proper safety when applying finish to wood projects. Oftentimes you would see people on Youtube or other social media operate without proper safety, they're being silly ππππ. As for myself I wore a p100 3M respirator and disposable nitrate gloves.
Due to time constraints, I was only able to apply 1 coat of both polyurethane and wax. Typical woodworkers apply at least 3 of each. Nonetheless I do think that I have created an excellent gift for my mother. I knew she liked it because she was really upset about me having polyurethane as part of my woodworking kit, but as soon as she saw the gift all the negative feelings flew away.
Reflections
Did I enjoy making this? Yes, absolutely. Will I do it again? No, probably not. As I previously mentioned I don't typically make gifts for mother's day, or any other holiday. It's simply not something I do. In my eyes, a gift is never equivalent for the lifetime of devotion my parents put into raising me. As such these are not methods of expressing gratitude or appreciation. Rather, it is my joy in having the opportunity to be part of their lives. Thank you, and happy mother's day.
Oh also, making this project was primarily inspired by Sophie, who also made a unique one for her mother.
On another note, I think it's also important to mention that it's almost impossible to get exotic woods like purpleheart from Taiwan. Although I do know local vendors that might sell this type of wood, I bought mine from Rockler's back in California. Yes, the purple is natrual and will get more vibrant over time*! Search Purpleheart on google for more info!
* 5/25/24 edit: upon further research purpleheart DOES change become more vibrant in the shorterm but over the span of a few years it will grow into a brown/black color. Learn more here(links to external site)