Laser Cutting a 5 mm Plywood Stegosaur

Another day, another model… this time a 5 mm plywood Stegosaur! This model is essentially the same as the brontosaur I did the other day except the profile is different. Of course, you can get this model over at CNCKing.com – it’s one of my first models and still a great joy to build regardless of which machine I use!

This went way smoother, getting my glue quantities dialed-in and learned from my mistakes last time around. Perfect model in the first try!

Cutting went well, no issues and as you can see, using masking paper makes a MASSIVE difference, it’s amazing how much soot builds-up even with a vacuum table and a 2HP extraction system. Oh yeah, I also have a gas kit on this Trotec Speedy 400 flexx which pushes 25-50 psi right down onto the cutting area where the laser is working.

What I really love about this laser is how clean the finish is, the pieces literally just fall out of the plywood – when I did projects like this with my ShopBot Desktop CNC router, you have tabs so there is always a secondary process of punching them out (easily done but extra step never the less). I’ve included a video below of this same project done on my Shopbot. Quite a contrast!

Man  what would I do without clamps! I “disable” all my rolling models on purpose btw, the reason is I want to put all of these on a shelf and I don’t want them to roll off. The easiest process to achieve this is to have one of the back wheels a bit off kilter, the model still rolls but not as easily.

Pretty darn close to the render don’t you think?