One of our members, Robert, needed to replace a cracked door on a popcorn machine in order to get it back up and running.
We grabbed the calipers, fired up the large laser cutter, and got to work! We started off by measuring the size of the door and the locations of the holes for the hinges and handle. We then used those values to make a simple design in Adobe Illustrator:
After double-checking our measurements, we imported the design into LightBurn, a new piece of software for controlling laser cutters like ours, and set the power settings for the piece of acrylic sheet we would be using:
We loaded in the sheet of acrylic, and started the cut! After a minute or so, we had a brand new popcorn machine door! It looked as good as the original so you couldn’t even tell it was replaced. We needed to make a small tweak to the tolerances to get the door to sit correctly on the hinges, but after that, it was as good as new:
I love being able to use the tools at ML256 to save the day in scenarios like this, and I hope we continue to see many more similar success stories and learning opportunities!