Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

OK, so the laser is bought, collected, set up and in the cave.

In shades of everything else from fucking to sailing to driving to you name it, the differences between theory and practice are greater in practice than in theory.

What I’m trying to say is, early days though it is yet, what a laser is *not* is what Epilog et al are trying to market it as, it is not a fucking printer attached to a PC that you just knock something up and hit print.

It’s like any other machine tool, every Bridgeport that comes off the line is subtly different to the one preceding it and the one following, and the operator has to learn these subtle differences, and indeed every operator is subtly different too, and will do things slightly differently.

Welcome to the world of CO2 lasers, where there is no “correct” speed and power (feeds and speeds) for any given material, but rather something the operator and his machine get a feel for, as a starting point, and finesse from there to taste.

It’s a pleasant surprise in a digital world, the good side of the double edged sword that when cutting the other way means it takes skill and experience to get top results, in other words the more Epilog like you try to make things, yeah, you protect people from the worst fuck-ups, but you also prevent them from being as good as they could be, I guess it is no surprise that Epilog owners are iPhone owners too.

It’s got a lot in common with the milling machine too, maximum machine feeds and speeds is a physical factor, total tool-path length to do job X is another, divide one into the other for the minimum time to do the job, then keep on dividing if you want to do the job well, then keep on dividing if you want to do the job as well as the machine possibly can.

You also walk around and “service” the machine, it’s not just a big printer you walk up to to load paper and remove the finished print, which is reassuring, to me anyway.

You also get people who are already in the club suddenly open up to you, like the guy who engraves gravestones, particularly photos and artwork on them… yeah man, with the stone I use, 13% power doesn’t work much, and 15% power doesn’t work much, but 14% seems good, and hey, if one pass didn’t make it pop out enough, I just do another pass, rerun the whole job… and hey, there is a reason we use the crappy newspaper style half-tone printing for graphics, and why we keep the lines per inch down, instead of doing grey-scale, it’s a lot fucking easer man, it’s a lot fucking faster too man, the great is the enemy of the good enough man…

Let me tell you something else, you think you’ve seen shit because you’ve seen a thousand pics and a thousand vids… no, I’m glad of the huge plexi window in the cover, and I’m glad of the polycarbonate lenses in my spectacles… start cutting organic shit like wood or MDF and boy, it doesn’t matter how small that spot actually is, the fucker is BRIGHT, way way beyond arc lamp / arc eye brightness, for all its tiny size…

No, just because it is non-contact, unlike a mill or a lathe, doesn’t make it any less a machine tool, with all that that entails, so if you want the best out of it, you have to form a relationship with it.

And because I love you guys, I just went out into the workshop, nekkid, I just want you to have that picture in your head, some naked guy operating a laser…lol.. who cares if it’s true or not… owww, my sausage just fell off..

So I grab some old rag, put it on the knife table, which is wrong, should be on the honeycomb table or better still on the vacuum table, but hey, this is just a quickie right.

I then type a single word into the control software, select a font, drag the shape around until it’s the size I want, pick a speed and power setting out of my ass, see what was said before and sent it to the laser, whammo.

Hit run on the laser and bingo, hmmm, not sure that has cut cleanly through, fuckit, press run again, yup, job’s done. Whole fucking process including duplicating the laser run is maybe 3 minutes… nekkid, don’t forget the nekkid bit…lol

The vid is uploaded and processing as I type, ready in 40 mins..

https://vimeo.com/106721705