Laser-cut 1/24 tie-down strips

[jimbo]

Greetings all; after seeing numerous mentions of a need for it I went ahead and did an ‘eyeball’ CAD drawing of 1/24 scale tie-down strips for laser cutting.

 

[Moderators, kindly advise if this is inappropriate here in General and I’ll gladly remove it or relocate it. I wanted to gauge interest in this before committing to a “Vendors Board” or “Traders Board” topic.]

 

Here’s a test-cut, the overall sheet is sized to fit a legal-sized envelope and contains ten 8-3/4” tie-down strips. The material is a cabinet-making product called Polybak, a resin impregnated paper product that super-glues fabulously. It’s .018” thick.

 

 

 

 

 

So here’s the rub fellows; each sheet of ten 8-3/4” long strips takes 24 minutes to cut (ironic, right?). Laser cutting is typically $1/minute, so 87-1/2” of tie-downs would cost $24. They were spaced 11 deck boards apart; to do a 20” x 20” display base one would need about 140 inches of these strips (using 6” wide deck boards as a reference). That’s pushing $40 for 16 strips, more for a bigger base. I think postage would be negligible here in the US, to ship abroad I would need to research but since they will fit a legal-sized envelope (I’m sorry I don’t know what European size that is) they are easy to ship.

 

SO, anybody interested? Should I take a hike? You won’t hurt my feelings to say it’s too expensive, but as they say time is money, and no, you can’t set the machine and walk away, that’s asking to burn your house or shop down.

 

If there is sufficient interest I’ll start a Vendors board topic and take this off General.

 

[PS: if anyone has any dimensional information or actual drawings of these strips I could easily tweak the drawing to make them more accurate. Mine are .25” wide, or a scale 6 inches.]

 

Jim “Jimbo” Harr

High Bridge, NJ

USA

 

Edited July 8, 2019 by jimbo
Dimensional clarity

[jimbo]

15 minutes ago, Jennings Heilig said:

You should consider doing them in 1/32 as well, to help reduce your costs.

 

I started a 1/32 test sheet but had to cancel it to re-work the drawing file, it wasn’t cutting satisfactorily. So I can certainly do 1/32 but not sure of the costs yet and how it compares to the available photo-etch products; it would likely be more expensive. Plus I see no reason to compete with existing vendors?

[jimbo]

Lol I guess so. 1/32 test done - strips are 7-1/8” long so 71-1/4 inches of tie-down strips would be $21 (~ .29¢/inch). Toms Modelworks does photoetched ones, 64-1/2 linear inches is $16.50 (~ .26¢/inch) . So slightly less for his.