Cut Small Sections of Dowel Rod
Instruction
Some project require small parts, and creating small parts is where a laser cutter/engraver excels. I recently had a need to cut .5 inch segments of dowel rod. After struggling with a hand saw, I realized my D1 would be the perfect tool to solve the problem. In this tutorial, I'll show you how I tackled this problem.
The first task was to think about how I wanted to process the cuts. I simply needed to make a straight cut after every .5 inches. I decided the best set up would be to draw a single line vector with a length of .25 inches. This would be plenty to pass over the .125 inch dowel rod and give room for any misalignment.
Next, I simply selected the line and used the array tool to duplicate it 10 times. I then set the spacing to .5 to give the desired length.
The settings are for the D1 5W laser. You may need to adjust the settings for your laser configuration.
Be sure to follow all the safety guidelines for your laser and always wear personal protective equipment when the laser is in operation.
Since the dowel rod is so small, I decided I would need something to hold it. I place a scrap piece of wood on the table and laid the rod on that. It helped, but the air blowing down through the laser would blow the small parts off the platform. I figure a good modification of this setup would be to mill a small trough in the piece of wood to hold the cut segments as the laser moved across the work piece.