If you've seen my first Instructable, you know my laser cutter saga. It's like a love story, really. Boy is thrown into teaching an unruly class. Department hands boy keys to a shiny laser cutter. Boy meets laser cutter. Boy and laser cutter make sweet laser sounds together...punctuated by the occasional acrid stench of burning wood glue and clouds of pungent smoke when air vents were blocked. Boy almost sets laser bed on fire...or actually does a few times but puts it out fast, thereby saving laser's life. Boy keeps all this quiet so the department won't take away his key. Huh...not like a love story at all. It sounded a lot better in the original write-up. Whatever. Anyway, after sadly turning in my keys at the end of the semester, I thought I'd never play with volatile laser beams again...at least until next year. BUT! My school has a Design, Build, Fly (DBF) team - although we always managed to catastrophically crash just before the competition...go figure - and a team member wants to get an early jump on manufacturing procedures in an attempt to revitalize the project. So whaddaya know, I'm now the go-to guy for lasers. Booya.
So it's time for a new saga! For years we've had these old central air supply and return vents in our hallway and garage. They're old-fashioned, impossible to clean, and bent up from years of hallway soccer and such games with four kids in the family. In short, they're ugly now, and too old to find a direct replacement. Custom or even stock metal covers are pricey...and mostly hideous. So what is the solution? Drab to fab and all that jazz - laser cut a new one out of wood!
The leading image is the final product for our garage vent cover. The second image shows a before-and-after for the hallway vent. Still a bit of work to do on that one - cleaning up the wall around the edges and such - but not too shabby overall. All of this work was done at the cost of materials and a bit of time on a CAD system, totaling perhaps $20 - because my usual wood shop was out of the size stock I needed, so I had to go to an art supply store, where they charge double. Figures.
Well, turns out I'm not revolutionary in this respect. There are a handful of vent cover companies that will custom laser cut your design (or CNC mill metal or plastic), but still, they're expensive. I could ship a design to Ponoko or the like, but I'd pay at minimum $30 between cutting and shipping, even with their cheapest materials. So, once again, having a free laser and living near a handful of hobby shops pays off! I can CAD my own design and cut at material cost - for something like this I can use a cheap 3/16" plywood at $3 to $4 bucks a sheet and easily make new covers for my hallway and garage vents. Yay! And then came the first roadblock. There are thousands of really nice vent cover designs - run a quick Google search for "fancy vent cover" and see what I mean. Granted, there are thousands of hideous ones, too, but while we want something modern-ish and interesting, we don't want a busy design. After all, it's a 15.25" x 7.25" (9.25") cover on a wall at shin level that will blend into the wall. This ain't the Ritz.
And then we found our second roadblock...coincidentally right next to the first. Our garage vent (seen in Step 1) has vertical bars. It hides the largest duct hot-air delivery duct in our house - a whopping 6 inch hole in a sheet metal box. Beautiful, eh? But the vertical lines in the old vent fail to disguise this...and most of the designs in Google searches have large amounts of blank space between straight lines or curvy designs. Not good. Too much blank space in the vent will leave an eyesore very visible - even at shin level - and too little will block our airflow (we use what once was a garage as a den, sort of). Straight lines won't work, and we don't want a Fleur-de-Lis-type pattern that matches nothing in our house. What to do?
Optical illusion! In a random search, a new type of design appeared - one made of broken, overlapping, and intersecting circles. I was immediately reminded of the lovely ripple clock by fungus amungus - the overlapping rings broke up the circular edge until closer look, so this seemed like the way to go. Better yet, it's a simple, geometrical design, so it will be quick to cut and easy to CAD. Long search over! Hurrah!
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