Laser Cutting: Earrings

Challenge: To extend a senior student at our school with the use of the laser cutter.   

Background: This student has completed a number of projects during the past few years, starting with Tinkercad using an iPad and has advanced to working with a laptop and using Gimp and Sketchup.  

The challenge for the student at the moment is to use the technology to work on projects independently to extend herself further.  With our recent (the end of 2023) School Market Day one of the significant projects that was created was using the 3D Printers and Laser Cutter to produce earrings.

The student has combined some of the ideas that they saw last year to work on original ideas for a series of earrings.   

There is the option of using the 3D Printer which produces the PLA/plastic designs.   However this student wanted to use the laser cutter to produce something along similar lines.    The student has started creating a range of ideas.   She has used some online software primarily Sketchup to create a range of geometric shapes - which are shown on the left.  

Once these have been designed and created they have then been printed out using the industrial sized laser cutter.   Each of the individual prints has then been removed from the main sheet of plywood.    When the prints have been removed in these examples they have then had coffee stained into the wood.   The final aspect of the designs has been the attaching of the earring metal clips to the pre-made holes in the shapes.    These have been purchased locally from a craft shop for a minimal amount.

The second kind of design potential was created by using Gimp to convert a freely available picture and to use the image such as shown with the cactus designs on the left.

Level of Difficulty for the Project: The individual earrings are low - however this is intended to be a long term project with a number of aspects to it with a variety of designs.   For instance a challenge for the student is to produce original laser cut stands to display the earrings for instances when they are going to be displayed.

Size: These are a variety of standard earrings sizes depending on the design of the individual objects.

Timeframe: Each of these individual laser cuts are approximately thirty seconds in length.   There is a slight variation depending on the depth and width of each print.