Bath Uni - Perspectives on Perspex

This week we managed to get Tim in the plastics workshop to do a few laser cut tests on Perspex. We gave him a selection of our icons, the ones we thought might cause and problem and unfortunately quite a few of them did!

We were forced to reduce the detail on quite a few of them to make them usable and we were also able to ascertain a minimum width for any element of around 5mm. With these restrictions in mind we went back over the four stencils and adjusted the symbols accordingly. We also found out how the laser cutter reads an Illustrator file - anything in a red (255,0,0) line of 0.1 to 0.25pt is cut and anything in black is etched. The etched stuff looks incredible when flipped and viewed form the smooth side, so we decided to reverse the stencil files and have our revised Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies "coffee bean" logo and the name for each stencil etched on the back side. I think it is going to look great.

The other thing we realised was that 6mm thick Perspex was probably going to be too heavy to use at the size we want (700mm x 400mm), so we have ordered 3mm stuff instead. We should be ready to make cut the stencils next week!