Trophy Project

So a family friend recently finished his 21th Cape Town Cycle Tour, which is quite the achievement. So I thought I'd make a trophy of sorts to present to him as a congratulations.

I recently bought myself an "Eleksmaker Elekslaser-a3 pro" with a 7W laser. I was planning to use it to engrave wood and cardboard, try cutting vinyls and its main purpose is for pcb etching which I want to experiment with.

Now...with the addition to the laser, I also have a 3d printer and a "CNC mill" (currently can only cut things out....need to rebuild it). So I saw this as the perfect opportunity to try a project utilizing all of these tools.

Design took way longer than I thought. I went through about 8 complete iterations....just shy of starting manufacturing...but such is things.

In the end I decided on CnC'ing a bike gear from clear acrylic and wet sanding it with a fine grit to give it a milky effect

The proposed gear

One of the failed cuts (the mill is scheduled for a rework soon)

The center piece is to be a piece of wood with Laser engraved details.  Unfortunately.....because I didn't understand the laser well enough....I messed up all the wood I was planned to use...So I ended up using some MDF....not great but sill produced a interesting looking result result.

And finally, to tie everything together, a 3D printed 'jig'. Bolted to the acrylic using M5 Bolts (spare parts from building one of my 3d printers) and 3d printed washers.

I printed this, painted it gold and added some basic grunge to make it seem more....gritty.

(I was in a bit of a rush while making this that I seem to have forgotten to take pictures of this components' progress)

I was extremely please to find that I had all the dimensions correct on the first try, giving me a very satisfied feeling.

A tablet stand I printed earlier coming in handy

I decided to paint the stand black, giving the entire piece a sense of....finesse.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out....and happy to report, so is the recipient.

The final product on the recipient's desk

I feel that next time I do something like this I can definitely improve upon what I've learnt during this endeavour.