Kresty working on Fusion Power Generator

[kresty]

Well, since Savage posted those wonderful plans, I'm thinking about a Fusion Generator.  I'm not really sure if I'm really doing it - but it seems like I'm doing at least part of it...

Along the lines of the "having a hammer, everything's a nail" philosophy, I don't have ready access to a CnC - but there is a laser cutter in the work garage.  It also gives me an excuse to play with styrene on the cutter.

I managed to get some 1/16" styrene, so here are the 1/16" bits.  Additionally I included one of the top fins just as a sanity check, this is the wrong thickness for that, but since Savage's plans have those 3D printed instead of laser cut, I thought I'd see how it looked.

1/16" Flat Pack bits for Fusion Generator - Laser Cut

The laser bed I have access to is only 18x24", so this was done in two passes.  The "grill" had to be chopped in half to fit, and I had to split the medium band strips.  To utilize the space/material I decided to chop it in 2/3 and 1/3  (The long bands were too long for Savage's CnC, so those were already split, as seen on the bottom 4 strips above).

As I mentioned, I haven't cut styrene with the laser before, so this was new.  There was a little charring on the bottom of a sample I'd done, so I tried putting some paper underneath.  That was a total failure as the paper tried to melt to the plastic, and the plastic itself burned a lot.  Unfortunately, the cut depth was pretty inconsistent, burning too hot in places and not quite cutting through in others.  This was our Universal at 100% power, 11% speed, 500hz.  I was able to pop out most of the almost-cut-through spots, and overall it seemed successful – though I am a bit concerned about burning the 1/8th inch when I get to that.  (It’d need 5% speed or some such, and presumably the too-much-cut/too-little-cut differences would be exaggerated.)