For the laser cutting excercise our team worked with 3mm cork sheet. The material in such  thickness is very flexible but quite brittle. We tried several designs, from which the one that could be synthesized in a sphere was this cutout sphere. However, the fabricated result was extremely unstable.

Digital Fabrication – Methacrylate Spheres using laser cutting

Canvas Sphere

Our choice of material was canvas. The challenge here being that it lacks stiffness.

The design comprises of 2 circles of 75mm diameter and 1 circle of 90mm diameter which formed our internal support systems and 25 crescents as the skin. After trial and error, we noted that a twisted arrangement of the canvas gave more structural stability. Thereby working the material’s flexibility to our advantage.

During the cutting exercise was used natural wood with thickness of 3mm. Design sphere included interconnecting 3  horizontal circular area with 12 vertical “slices” using method of slits with offset of 0.5 mm according to the thickness of the material.  As a result of the exercise, obtained a very compact, solid sphere  without need for  using glue or other linkers.

Sphere_laser cutting

Laser cutting time – 14 minutes.

Size of the sheet – 68×36 cm

Size of the spheres – 12 cm in diameter

Sphere_strategy 1

We divided sphere into 10 equal slices by cutting the sphere with radial planes, after that  we applied twisting to these slices by 60 degrees. By unrolling surface of the slice we were able to have 2D element on which we made joints suitable for flexible material such as polypropylene.

Sphere_strategy 2

The second sphere was created by dividing sphere into 12 equal slices, also done by cutting the sphere with radial planes. Here, we experimented with folding detail on two points of sphere where slice sheets meet.

we lasered out concentrical rings and stacked them together. Due to this technique we needed very little material, the size of the sheet needed was only 25 x 14cm.

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