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!
Several years ago, I was commissioned by a cosplayer to build replicas of Dante's twin pistols, Ebony and Ivory, from the Devil May Cry video game series. I was still new to prop-building so I cut the body of each gun out of 3/4" MDF and glued on bits of plastic to make them look like their game counterparts. 
For the new version, I refined the detail in Adobe Illustrator and planned out the parts so they could be built using layers of laser-cut MDF. This would allow for maximum accuracy as well as the engraving on the barrels. 
Created using a C02 lasering machine.-laser machine + required software
Laser cut gears are used in a wide variety of projects, from steampunk jewelry to the exposed mechanism of a wooden clock. By taking advantage of both the cutting and engraving capabilities of the laser, much more realistic and/or interesting gears can be created. Here I show how to create a basic laser cut gear (in traditional 2D), then how to use three different techniques for adding depth to the gear (a 2.5D effect). This is referred to as 2.5D because although it is adding a third dimension (essentially a Z axis) it is much more limited than the 3D you could obtain from a 3D printer or 4-6 axis milling machine. 
What i needed to make that laser is:
Hello everyone, I made an acrylic rose display piece for a loved one. I was lucky enough to have access to an Epilog laser cutter at the time. If I were to win an Epilog Zing 16 Laser, I would start a small business making sculptures, jewelery, and other cool and unique things.
I first started by creating some petal shapes that varied slightly, in CorelDraw. I then sent the file to the laser cutter and cut them out.
If you've worked with a certain major brand of wood glue you have probably run into the dreaded "glued on top" phenomena. No matter how persnickety you are about cleaning the outside of the top, there's always glue trapped between the "pop-up" spout and the fixed part of the top that semi-hardens, just enough to make opening the top a job for magilla-gorilla.
One fairly straight forward fix is to cut an acrylic disc, like I did at the Techshop, http://techshop.ws, to fit under the top's ridge. This gives you a larger area to grip and pull up the top. But, the lower edge of the disc has a sharp edge, left from laser cutting.
Earlier this year i made something like this below with bunches of foam strips , small plastic food container and some random pieces i had around in my room. Anyway, before the Ironman3 releases, I decided to make a new and smaller one version that only 15mm thick. using the main picture as a reference. Im not that good tho T_T and i lost all of my tools while i was out of the country. So i opt for laser cutting. 
As usual, to start any project, you will need lots of reference and vector for bluprint. It will act as a guide to build your project. In this case, im using this picture . I got this from a search at google. I believe its from one of the Instructable here . Anyway, use that image to vector the lines. In my case, i made it separate 2 pieces for depth. i guess .. haha 
Say you have a laser cutter and want to use an entire sheet of acrylic, say 24 x 18 inches like is capable on the Epilog Helix 24 60-watt laser cutters we have available at Tech Shop in Detroit, Michigan. If you are cutting some initial test pieces and don't want to remove the entire sheet of acrylic (removal would throw off the alignment of the laser and subsequent parts wouldn't quite match up perfectly) then you can use this quick and easy method to remove parts from the master acrylic sheet. This method is super easy and utilizes parts and equipment that should be on hand at every Tech Shop location. 
Roll a wet/dry vac over to the laser-cutter area, and acquire a single coffee filter and some tape (I used painter's tape that I had on hand). Put the coffee filter over the mouth of the vacuum attachment, and tape securely in place. ![OrientEX Mini Touchpad Wireless Keyboard for Windows 7/ MacOS 10.x or later/ Linux Debian 3.1 with laser pointer and presentation [R.F 2.4G Black]](/wpid-41kw7kAnx0L.jpg)
Introduction: