Today we continued working on our carabiners and watched the laser cutter be used for the first time! Watching the laser cutter was exhilarating; it's amazing how fast the laser moves and with such accuracy! To create with the laser cutter, we first make our design in Inkscape. The lines must be red with a "hairline" diameter of .003 inches. One thing I love about Inkscape is it is easy to switch back and forth between various scales of measurements, such as inches, mm, cm, and pixels.
I created my design with Bezier Curves, which are lines that can be manipulated by creating nodes along the length of the line.
http://www.newtechtips.org/bezier-curve-in-c/
It took some time to get familiar with editing the angles and connecting and disconnecting nodes, but once I figured it out, I really appreciated how simple and professional the Bezier curves look.
Here's my final design for the carabiner, but before I came to this design, I had the hole across from the carabiner opening (on the left in my drawing below). This meant, however, that stress would be on the opening, which is the weakest part of the carabiner. I fixed this by moving the hole to the side instead.
I also experimented with how thin the opening of the carabiner should taper. Would the Delrin be flexible? Next class I will cut and test my design!
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