Christmas gift for Nana & PopPop in 2021.

Since we aren’t going to church for services, Mom and I thought it would be nice to make candle holders so we could do that tradition at home. I initially thought about 3D printing it, but lately I’ve liked laser cutting a lot more (material is nicer, process is faster, design constraints and 2D layout are immensely satisfying) and I decided to do that instead. I also thought it would be a fun little group activity to assemble them.

Here was my first sketch. I almost didn’t bother adding it here because it was so bad. But I think it’s fun to see anyway.

The idea is that it would be made of 3 pieces, two vertical handle pieces and a circular wax catching piece which would slot on top. Everything would be cut from 1/8" Birch Plywood on the Vassar Innovation Lab’s Epilog Laser Cuttter. It would cost a total of $4 in materials. Here was my 3D model:

I then took that design, made drawings from the components, and imported it into Illustrator, where I added some decoration. Here were the finished vector file layouts:

After duplicating that a bunch of times and adding a little sign to fill up the rest of the board, here’s what the layout looked like:

For the file I actually send to the laser cutter, the line weights for cutting have to be 0.01, but it’s nicer to see them this way. I think turned out pretty well though!

ADD IN DETAILS ABOUT HOW CUTTING IT WENT AND HOW IT WAS RECEIVED!!

For archival purposes, here’s a .zip file containing the 3D model and Illustrator files.

OK soooo maybe the laser cut assembly wasn’t my first idea…

Initially I had hoped to try out Fusion 360’s Generative Design feature to make something cool and organic looking. I imagined something like this, but as a candle holder:

Unfortunately, I haven’t actually tried working with generative design before, and it came out looking pretty bad.

Anyway, I think my abilities with constraints and also properly estimating the forces exerted by a candle might need some work. I’m definitely coming back to trying this, but I decided to abandon it for this project because I didn’t really have time to learn.