A Blog About Digital Fabrication
  • Projects
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

Polypropylene cutting using a craft cutter

1/6/2015

Comments

 
When I lived in London I did a short course in furniture design at Central St. Martin’s College, run by Ben Panayi.  As part of that course I produced a design for a lampshade made from polypropylene.
Picture
I later simplified the cutting outline so that, while it looked the same when assembled, it now comprised of 4 identical shapes plus one other small shape in the centre.  In what ended up being my first ever foray into digital fabrication, I asked Medway Cutters to use their craft cutter to cut this as a trial/prototype.

Craft cutters use a drag knife, which works as the name implies: a knife is dropped into the material, then dragged along the lines specified in your CAD file.  Being a drag knife with an angled blade, it means that there will be a slight over-cut where two cutting lines meet.  Being 1mm-thick polypropylene though, these were very minimal in my lampshade.

I have kept this lampshade since then and brought it out again recently to be part of the design for a new floor lamp:
Picture
It is something I will definitely continue with for this or other pieces.
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

    Author

    I'm Nicolaas, a software engineer with a creative streak.

    Archives

    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015

    Categories

    All
    Assembly
    Bed
    Bending Plywood
    Cabinet
    CAD
    CNC Routing
    Couch
    Craft Cutting
    Digital Fabric Printing
    Dovetail Catch
    Lamp
    Polypropylene

    RSS Feed

  • Projects
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact