Tinkercad and Industrial Design

Playing around some more with Tinkercad and Scratch SVG files, I discovered a cool way to create a laser cut project. First, what is laser cut? Laser cut is when you use some sort of cutting apparatus that "reads" where to cut from your Tinkercad file. Take a look here at the Tinkersmith workshop projects, woodcuts created from a tricked out table saw that operates like a 3D printer extruder, attached to a hinged arm that follows Tinkercad designed instructions about where to start and stop cuts. And more, the New York Times "Wood Shop Enters the Age of High Tech".

So, how do you create such a file in Tinkercad? For my test, I uploaded the Scratch SVG sprite "bass guitar" (I had to fix it using the xml code I gave you in the previous post) to Tinkercad. Then, in Tinkercad, I went to Design>download for 3D printing and on the bottom of the pop up, go to the "download for laser cutting". What this does is that Tinkercad creates a 2D file that "cross cuts" the 3D image. Then, you upload this new 2D SVG file back into Tinkercad, and you'll see it gives you a 2D cross section from the 3D file that you can send to the "cutting" machine.