Who wouldn't enjoy the sight of a small flickering tealight? How about one with a shadowcaster?
We prepared a little lasercut project for you to add to your Halloween decorations with some instructions. Be warned! The ghosts of these pumpkins may paint odd images on your walls...
The shadowcaster file is easy to customise inside LightBurn. You can unite and substract shapes, weld them together or prepare arrays using more shapes, and cut them out from the base. The possibilities are limitless. You can also use Cuttle.xyz to make interesting geometrical wonders and merge it with your design. We based our pumpkin drawings of a design we picked from Freepik.com.
A few things to keep in mind is the thickness of the material you are about to use, and the scale of your shadow caster. We made the circle in the middle to fit a standard IKEA tealight, which is about 38mm in diameter. To make a good nesting that prevents slipping of the tealight yet makes it easy to remove, we set the circle's diameter to be 40mm.
Account for kerf in your design! If your material is 4mm in thickness (do measure it beforehand, do not take for granted what the manufacturer wrote on its label, or on their webpage), set the slots a little tighter so friction will hold the shapes well in place, avoiding the use of glue.
The bottom tabs must be long enough to fit, but not too long, so it doesn't poke through the bottom. Then again, up to you: if you decide to make a tealight with feet, make sure the circle hole cut for the tealight is engraved deeply into the material instead of fully cut through.
The orange layer with dashed lines is a "Tool" layer. It means that no action will be taken by your laser cutter with it, but you can always copy the contents of this layer and set new parameters for it. If you leave "Frame" on the right side checked in (or left on green, not red in the switch), it will count those objects into the frame of your file on the material. Unless these objects are moved to a cut or engrave layer, it will not appear on your material.
You can download the project files here!
Show us your makes by tagging us (smoke_and_pictures) on Instagram and Twitter (@tweetsandmirrors) !
Happy making!
