The Story: Laser Cutting a Guitar

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My little brother's favorite band is Daft Punk. For his birthday, I wanted to give him guitar a with the name, "Daft Punk," and lyrics to his favorite song, "Get Lucky," engraved on it. I created the design on Adobe Illustrator, used 1/8th inch blue acrylic, and cut it with a ULS VLS 6.60 Laser.

Since this project would be time consuming on the laser cutter, I divided the work into chunks so I could adjust the settings or plan if necessary along the way. First, I wanted to score the outline of the guitar so we could see the placement of the work on the acrylic sheet. Then, I had a choice to do the scoring of the lyrics or engraving of the words, "Daft Punk." I chose to engrave first so I could keep the tape on as long as possible. The tape prevents scorching and unwanted cuts on the acrylic.

Timelapse of the laser engraving the words, "Daft Punk," onto the body of the guitar.

This is the laser cutting the acrylic in slow motion.

This is the engraving on the picks, before I scored and peeled the tape off. I cut a circle in the picks so they could be put on a keychain.

I then peeled off the tape and scored the lyrics. I had to peel off the tape because it would be inefficient to score the letters and peel off hundreds of little pieces of tape (ex: the hole in an, "e").

This is the neck of the guitar. I scored the tape, then peeled off the guitar shape. I then scored the lyrics of Get Lucky into the guitar.

Head of the guitar.

After all the cutting and engraving, I peeled off all the tape. While all the laser work was finished, I still needed to make final touches. The guitar was very dusty after the cut, because the laser literally disintegrates the acrylic into powder. So, I took a small, vaccume-like tool from a powder 3-D printer and cleaned the mess up.

Slow motion of tool sucking powder up.

After all the final retouches, the guitar was finished.