This week I did a lot of experimenting with vinyl cutting lenticular lenses. I first cut a partial box from some scrap that I had from last semester when I was working with large arrays of leds behind lenticular lenses.

Blade Settings:

I then tried to experiment with different cameo blade settings only to realize that after cutting lenticular, my blade wont reset below 5. Here is a test piece I cut with different depths before realizing that the auto blade was not consistently adjusting to a specific height. I continued to cut lenticular using a depth setting of 1 which shows up as 6 on auto blade (usually). The force is 25, speed 2, and 2 passes. These settings cut a path deep enough into the lenticular that it can be peeled apart along the cut line and folded on the dotted lines without breaking.

The Platonic Solids:

My first attempt was a dodecahedron (using templatemaker.nl), the cutting went fine, since the blade cant cut through the vinyl even on the greatest depth and pressure, the scoring method seems to be the best that I can do with this blade. I think I need to try the craft blade. The edges were somewhat difficult to glue together, I tried to use superglue on the tabs but that didn’t hold, hot glue worked but looks like a total mess. After constructing the solid, I left one flap open to insert lights into. There was an interesting effect with a led bulb inside, it melted on a fluorescent light almost immediately.

The platonic solid lens worked wonders on top of an LED array so I decided to make more of them to use up all the scrap material. Taping the edges works a little better than the glue methods I have tried but it changes the lens effect and therefore is especially noticeable. I am still trying to figure out the best way to hide the edge connections of the solids.