[murmur] ben Harwood’s futurecraft blog A little theme for wordpress, please recycle.

I found a ‘how to’ on instructibles about laser cutting bike stencils to make decals… and I just got a new bike and needed a name for it, so … I thought I’d call my bike “futurecraft” as in “hovercraft” or “spacecraft” to signify my hope that bikes are, while also being a craft of the past, hopefully the craft of the future as far as transportation devices go.

well, i tried to learn illustrator, photoshop, and cad in order to make this all work and its taken me a little longer… er… than expected. I have also never used a laser cutte, i am embarrassed to say…
also, all of harvard apparently waits until 3 am to laser cut so we’ll see how long i can wait along until i get too tired to drink more red bull.

The difficulty was trying to turn a picture of a bike chain link into a vector - based file,

then trying to make the letters “futurecraft” out of said chainlinks.

then trying to get cad to read and recognize my illustrator file (non-intel chip based pc not-withstanding, i.e. having to interface with a pc to do cad, both of which i dislike (cad and pc’s)). anyhoo.. let’s see if the laser cutters (”blonde” “brunetter” “redhead” or “ebony”) are open… let’s hope I don’t laser my fingers off…

Here’s my mad skillz in CAD…

not so finished yet

I decided at about 4 am that it was going to be too tough to get an appropriate stencil out of the chain lettering without putting significantly more thought into where the cutting path was in order to make the stencil hold together and still look like a chain when you spraypaint. When you make a stencil you have to cut the inverse of what you eventually want to see stenciled (duh!) so its a little difficult to execute when its really late at night…

Pictured below is ‘Redhead” my new trusty laser cutter… oh btw… this is my first time blogging as well as my first time laser cutting… I think i did a pretty slip-shod job on both!

oh, and i’m really bad at cad too, i couldn’t get the cad/cam set up to just cut the outline of the letters, it kept rasterizing instead of vectoring! Clearly computer/mechanical error is to blame : )

So in the end I just drew line segments in CAD to make the words “Futurecraft” and then cut that, which worked! anyways, its not my original vision but at least its something… now i just need to find some paint so i can apply the decal to my bike!

Et Voila!!

ok - signing off…

Ben