So, I bought an Ortur Laster Master 2 Pro laser engraver a couple months ago. Been learning how to use it, also picked up a rotator system for engraving pen blanks (among other things, but its really good for pens!!) and have been learning how to use that. A problem I have consistently had is getting everything realigned for each job. To improve my capabilities there, I picked up a piece of 2'x2' plywood, and engraved a 40cm x 40cm grid in it. This was really nice and helpful, but...it did not actually solve the alignment issue, especially when engraving pens, where I need to raise the entire engraving system by about 3.5" in order to get it focused properly on the pen blanks when they are held in the rotator.
After fiddling with a few naïve ideas, like just drawing lines from the corners of the grid out to the edge of the plywood (which doesn't work unless you can get your eyeballs REALLY far away from both the engraver rails and the plywood), I started thinking about more complex solutions. I set about designing a realignment system I could attach to the rails of the Ortur 2, and adjust so that I could align each corner. It started out somewhat simple, just two pieces of wood cut into a kind of S-like shape:
These could then be placed on the railings, and shifted along the two rails at a corner until their edges met, where the corner of the grid should be placed. That then became more complex, as I thought about how to actually align exactly at each corner, and I thought about cutting a channel in the lower part of each, and even threading a wire or long needle through the center of each channel, so that I could find the EXACT point where the corner of the grid should go. I then thought about 3D printing the whole thing, so that I could make the height of the S shaped tool adjustable depending on the size (depth) of the thing I was engraving.....
It just kept getting more complex!!!
While thinking about how to make this work well, without being too complex, I was standing over the engraver looking at a little box that was formed by the two lines I'd drawn from each corner of the grid, to where they met with the railings of the Ortur 2 itself... And the lightbulb finally went off.
This was WAY simpler than I'd been making it. All I needed was a box...or rather, a rectangular cube. Keeping it REAL simple, just a piece of squared wood, with the right width and length such that when I fit it into the corner of the engraver, the other corner would be exactly where the grid corner would go. I also realized that I would just need two of those, one for the lower left corner, and one for the upper right. Once both alignment blocks were in place, and the corners of the grid were aligned, the entire system would be aligned.
Well, the hardware stores close in 5 minutes, so I won't be able to pick up all the wood I need to do this till tomorrow. Suffice it to say, though...I like the ridiculously simple solution to the problem much more than the significantly more complex solution I was originally cooking up. The alignment blocks are also easy to make work at just about any height I would need, simply by making the height of the blocks themselves tall enough. I figure 5.5" would do for just about anything I have thus-far considered engraving, and most of the time I only need 3.5" for the rotator.
Sometimes, the solution to some problems is so simple, we can often look right past it! Today I remembered: KISS!
After fiddling with a few naïve ideas, like just drawing lines from the corners of the grid out to the edge of the plywood (which doesn't work unless you can get your eyeballs REALLY far away from both the engraver rails and the plywood), I started thinking about more complex solutions. I set about designing a realignment system I could attach to the rails of the Ortur 2, and adjust so that I could align each corner. It started out somewhat simple, just two pieces of wood cut into a kind of S-like shape:
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__|These could then be placed on the railings, and shifted along the two rails at a corner until their edges met, where the corner of the grid should be placed. That then became more complex, as I thought about how to actually align exactly at each corner, and I thought about cutting a channel in the lower part of each, and even threading a wire or long needle through the center of each channel, so that I could find the EXACT point where the corner of the grid should go. I then thought about 3D printing the whole thing, so that I could make the height of the S shaped tool adjustable depending on the size (depth) of the thing I was engraving.....
It just kept getting more complex!!!
While thinking about how to make this work well, without being too complex, I was standing over the engraver looking at a little box that was formed by the two lines I'd drawn from each corner of the grid, to where they met with the railings of the Ortur 2 itself... And the lightbulb finally went off.
This was WAY simpler than I'd been making it. All I needed was a box...or rather, a rectangular cube. Keeping it REAL simple, just a piece of squared wood, with the right width and length such that when I fit it into the corner of the engraver, the other corner would be exactly where the grid corner would go. I also realized that I would just need two of those, one for the lower left corner, and one for the upper right. Once both alignment blocks were in place, and the corners of the grid were aligned, the entire system would be aligned.
Well, the hardware stores close in 5 minutes, so I won't be able to pick up all the wood I need to do this till tomorrow. Suffice it to say, though...I like the ridiculously simple solution to the problem much more than the significantly more complex solution I was originally cooking up. The alignment blocks are also easy to make work at just about any height I would need, simply by making the height of the blocks themselves tall enough. I figure 5.5" would do for just about anything I have thus-far considered engraving, and most of the time I only need 3.5" for the rotator.
Sometimes, the solution to some problems is so simple, we can often look right past it! Today I remembered: KISS!
