Stand For The CAMM 1 GX-24 Vinyl Cutter

Stand for the CAMM 1 GX-24 Vinyl Cutter.

My
goal was to build a stand for the CAMM 1 GX-24 Vinyl Cutter used in the Fablab. The
parts of the stand were going to be connected to each other by press fit only,
without the use of glue or nails. 

Firstly,
I decided to use 4 mm soft wood (triplex), as it is a cheap material
readily available everywhere. The wood parts were cut with the laser
cutter. I made the design on Illustrator. In order to draw the correct settings for the press fit, I needed to take in account that the laser cutter burns ca 0.4 mm of material. I wanted the joints of the material to be of 8.0 mm. Thus:

Protruding parts: 8.4 mm / Indents: 7.6 mm / Dept: 4.0 mm.

Using these settings, I obtained perfectly press-fitting pieces of material. The top of the stand was designed with four circular indents to accommodate the feet of the vinyl cutter. In this way, there is less chance that the machine slips away from its position.

The laser settings were: 

Cutting: s = 1.1 / p = 95 / ppi = 1000  | Raster: s = 19 / p = 95 / ppi = 1000  

Unfortunately,
after connecting all the pieces I realized that the triplex is not
thick enough to build stable furniture. The stand looked nice, but not
stable at all.

Second experiment.
After a discussion with
Alex, I switched to another material MDF (medium density fiber board) 12.0 mm thick,
therefore more stable. However, the MDF cannot be cut with the laser
cutter because of its thickness. I tried to find some good settings to cut this material with
the milling machine. However, the precision of such machine is far too low
for the design of press fit furniture.

Third successful experiment.
Finally,
Alex suggested the perfect material: MDF 8.0 mm thick,which can be cut with the laser cutter! I designed again the settings for the new material. I wanted the joints be of 12.0 mm long. Thus:

Protruding parts: 12.4 mm / Indents: 11.6 mm / Dept: 8.0 mm.

The laser settings were: 

Cutting: s = 0.4 / p = 100 / ppi = 400 (Manual focus at the bottom of the material)

Feet indents - Raster: s = 19 / p = 95 / ppi = 1000

The plain of the laser cutter is probably not flat. Thus, the long pieces of the stand were not cut properly at their right side. To overcome this problem, these parts of MDF were cut twice by removing part of the drawings in Illustrator before removing the material from the machine.

While preparing the top of the first piece of furniture, I noticed that the laser cutter takes a long time to raster all the four semi-holes at the same time. Therefore, I prepared the top of the new stand in three steps:
1. Raster the two semi-holes on the left
2. Raster the two semi-holes on the right
3. Cut
The three-step procedure is quite fast.

All the pieces were finally hammered together. I used a big hammer and initially assembled the shelves and the sides together with Alex. It helped to have a table as tall as the shelf for support.
After the skeleton was made, I could proceed on my own (See Building instructions at the end).

I wanted to decorate the stand with some patterns using the laser cutter. However, the laser took more the two hours to realize one side of the stand, without even finishing it. It looked quite nice, but to finish the decorations in the whole stand it would have taken definitely too long.

Decoration (light pattern) - Raster: s = 50 / p = 40 / ppi = 1500  

Decoration (dark pattern) - Raster: s = 30 / p = 60 / ppi = 400  

At this point it seemed obvious to use vinyl for the decoration of the stand for the vinyl cutter! I used the design already made in Illustrator.

Machine Settings:

Pen Force: 150 gf
Speed: 20cm/s

And this is the final result.

Building Instructions.