Laser-cut Bas-Relief

Carving structures from wood or plastic often involves powerful machines that are big and Loud. The power is needed largely to remove all of the waste material in order to shape the contours of the finished carving. This operation is usually done in an industrial facility where making lots of noise is permitted and tolerated. But what if you're a hobbyist or craftsman looking to create products a home or in a small workshop where loud noise and vibrations from heavy cutting machines is not allowed? At best, you could get away with smaller, quieter hobby CNC routers that remove only thin slivers of material that barely scratch the surface of the stock. Carving large objects this way would take forever.

How About Using a Laser Cutter to Create Bas-Relief ?
The notion that we could create bas-relief carvings with a laser cutter seems ridiculous at first, until you consider how 3D prints are created. Popular 3D resin printers and filament printers use an additive process wherein layer upon layer of material is built up to produce a finished 3-dimensional object. Most CNC routers use a subtractive process to remove layers of materials to carve 3D objects from a solid block of material. Laser cutters, on the other hand, generally cut patterns from a single layer of material.

So why not combine the processes? The additive layer build up, the subtractive waste material removal, and the CNC router for finishing the carving. That is the premise behind merging a laser cutter with a CNC router.

Lets Review the Process in Detail
One of our clients manufactures handmade swords and knives that require leather-covered wooden handles. We'll use one of these wooden handles to demonstrate the concept of Laser Assisted Bas-relief Carving. Here is a 3D Model of the handle, created using our CAD program. Beside it is the model cut in two halves:

When carving the handle on a flat-bed CNC router, we would fabricate the two halves then glue them together to finish the handle. We could also cut the internal tang grooves first into two separate pieces of wood, then glue the wood together and carve the external contours of the handle on a CNC with a rotary axis, or on a CNC lathe. For the Laser-cut bas-relief process described here, we will ignore the rotary carving method and consider only the flat-bed CNC router approach for producing our finished handle.

Instead of showing the handle half as a one-piece construction made from a single slab of wood, we could also represent it as four 2.5mm thick "slices" of wood (or "layers") that are bonded together to produce the finished handle half. This is the thickness of the Luan Meranti plywood that we use in our production shop as it is easily cut in one pass with our 10-watt diode laser cutter. (Naturally, you may choose any thickness that works for your laser cutter.)

You will likely notice that the top 4th slice breaks apart into smaller pieces due to the taper of the handle. The first slice also breaks apart due to the opening that is cut for the tang groove. Since we have to anchor the wood to our machining table we can attach the separated portions to extra material that we can cut away at the end of the machining process. Thus we can revise or slices as shown in the drawing above, so that each slice has "waste" material attached, which will get cut off once the final shape of the handle is cut. To make things even more simple, we could eliminate slice-4 altogether and replace it with a second slice-3. Then the final layered construction would look like this: 

When glued together, these slices of wood become the blank stock for the handle half; with much less waste material for the CNC router to remove. This means that a smaller, quieter router could remove thin cuts of material faster to carve the finished handle.

Save Time on Batch Jobs With a StokMag

Running multiple jobs one after the other to create stacks of individual layers can eat up a lot of time loading and clamping materials on the cutting table. Using our innovative StokMag Quick-Change Magazine system saves you that precious time while speeding up your workflow. Here's a look at a prototype unit, and how it is used inside one of our custom 2-Head Laser cutters:

Our StokMag comprises two main parts: A removable stock cartridge that holds the sheet material you plan to cut or engrave, and a magazine-type docking bay for quickly swapping spent cartridges with new ones. The complete system features two or more cartridges and one magazine. Simply slide your sheet stock into the removable StokMag material cartridge as illustrated in the photo below featuring another of our prototypes.

 Run your cutting or engraving or cutting job. Then pull out the finished parts and discard the waste material. The material cartridge is then reloaded with new sheet stock, or a second preloaded StokMag on standby is swapped in to start the next job right away. StokMag cartridges feature a steel mesh floor that catches all of the cut-outs that break away from the stock sheet so no parts get left behind when swapping out the magazine for the new one. You could also operate your machine with just the StokMag cartridge if you furnish your cutting table with a loading bay to hold the cartridge in place as shown below in a picture of our another prototype setup:

And that is how we create most of our bas-relief carved wood handles and carved wood sculptures in-house.

Download our 3D Model Package to get construction plans to make a StokMag for your own Laser cutter. Or contact info@alati3d.com to get one Made2Order for your particular setup.