SketchUp, Inkscape, and Ponoko Laser Cutting

Step 2 A Sketchup Cube for Laser Cutting

This is a tutorial for those who have a little bit of understanding about SketchUp and how to use it. SketchUp comes with some good tutorial built in, so if you're a little puzzled to begin with, you should start with these.

For this first design we would like to explore a "tooth interlock" approach to joining the laser cut faces of the cube (hopefully without any need for glue).

Make yourself a cube in SketchUp and decide upon material thickness. The first image shows a 4cmx4cm base. From there we extrude a 4x4x4cm cube (picture 2).

It is then important to decide on the material thickness at this stage. We will be using 3mm materials and so we mark this on the cube (the 3rd picture).

To start the tooth design, simply bisect the material joins using the SketchUp line tool (your pointer should snap to mid-points for easy bisection and regular teeth). This is shown in picture 4.

The last step is to remove lines in order to end up with a cube with faces that have interlocking teeth (picture 5).

Comments

[justtosha]

I'm not familiar enough with the SketchUp so, cuold you help me pleas? Ho do you mark the "material thickness"? Just draw the imagine intersection lines? - I could not find any menu in the SketchUp to do it automatically.

[FazJaxton]

Yes, you are just drawing the lines to create the outlines of the 6 surfaces of the cube. First create all the boxes like in picture 4, then erase edges to make it like picture 5. You want to mark the material 3mm (or whatever your material thickness is) in from the edge. There are several ways you can do this. You can create guides by selecting the tape measure, clicking the edge, moving the mouse into the plane of the surface to draw on, typing "3mm" and pressing enter. You could also just create a 3mm offset from the outline of the surface. I highly recommend at least running through the 4 introductory google sketchup videos before starting (http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos/new_to_gsu.html). Understanding how it works makes a big difference in making it easy to use.