Laser Cutting and Building my Rocket Coaster

Jon Off CNCKing.com News,

Easily one of the most complex projects I’ve done in a while here at CNCKing.com, laser cutting and building my Rocket Coaster was interesting… I had to build it in three phases as I kept running out of clamps. I’ve since doubled-up on my clamp number in the shop so that shouldn’t be an issue any longer.

It’s quite a departure from making my little 3D dinosaurs!

This model was made from a number of large pieces so while the glue was drying, I needed lots of pressure all around them. To give you an idea of scale, here is a close-up of some of the detail in these parts.

And further back… the bed of our Trotec Speedy 400 flexx is 100 x 60 cm… and if that’s still not enough, I can open the front and back to cut or engrave stuff that’s infinite in length!

The best part of this whole project? When you have your laser settings dead-on so you can just “lift” the scrap and end-up with this.

Now that’s beautiful! After taking all the masking off – I’m not a fan of sanding my parts down to remove smoke stains – the long process of putting everything together begins.

I have the Ferris Wheel in the background as I was working on these two projects at the same time… hence running rather thin on clamps overall!

Building the arms took a bit of playing around, the part tolerance is awesome for lasers but not so good when you have big fingers trying to get into small spaces, I ended-up using small pieces of wood with a hammer to jam a few interlocks into place where my fingers couldn’t.

Once the dry glued, the end model looks pretty damn good!

The next day I drove it down to Maker Faire New York for my trade booth selling my physical books, the Eiffel Tower on the left is about a meter tall (not full scale as per my drawings) and both of these models were a hit at the show!