Saturday’s rain kept us indoors, but there’s no lack of things to do getting our Purcellville location up and running! 

Ten volunteers built out storage areas within our woodworking furniture, prepared ceiling electrical spool/plugs for mounting, measured out our lower building as part of our plan to make a ceramics shop, made some of our long-stored equipment look new again, and generally organized the wood shop. 

Here are some pictures showing our equipment transformations...

There are still workdays coming up with loads of tasks on the to-do list, so if you have some time, please come by and help! More helps means everything gets done faster!!

I saw someone at the space post about etching slate coasters using the laser cutter, and I thought, "Hey! That's a super cool idea. I should do that!"

So, I started looking around for blank slate coasters. I found some locally, but the price was *way* high. After a lot of searching, I found a guy on Ebay selling them for around $6 per set of 4, but I had to buy a case. Thinking that this would be a thing that I could resell, I went ahead and bought them.

I had no real guidance, but after taking the Laser cutter intro class, I had a clue as to how to go about it -- I'd need vector images that I could resize seamlessly so they'd fit.

Google was my friend, here, and with only a little effort, I was able to find what I was looking for: free vector silhouette images. As an aside - nearly all of the free image locations had sneaky redirect links to paid sites like istockphoto and shutterstock.

With my images located, I just followed the instructions from the Laser Cutter Intro class. (protip: KEEP THE HANDOUT THEY GIVE YOU!)

One thing that kept catching me out, though, was that someone had turned on "Auto Z", so after I'd set the Z (which is the distance from the laser to the item being etched) and hit go, the table would move! It took a while to find that setting (it's on the "Settings" tab of the print driver)

Each image took about 5 minutes to burn, and I did both front and back. 8 images, x 5 minutes == 40 minutes of cutter time

Keep an eye out on this space! Pretty soon it will be full of useful Makersmiths information, photos, tutorials and more...