Off to TechShop to strap down sheets of polyester film and inflict intense beams of coherent light upon them with the Mighty 45 Watt Epilog*.
If all goes well, the parts I need for this afternoon's work will be found among the debris.
Must remember the earmuffs this time. The screams are most distracting.
Update: Mr. Mylar was most uncooperative. I spent nearly all of my 2-hour time slot trying to get the parameters dialed in. Then... just at the end of the process... I realized that the solid bits between the little slots were much smaller than they should have been. Turns out that, when I made a batch of the previous iteration of this little part, back in June, I left the final artwork on my thumb drive instead of copying it back onto the laptop and thence to Subversion. So, I was carefully making revisions to faulty artwork that simply couldn't be successfully cut on that machine.
Oh, well. The revised artwork having been found, I've applied the June fix to the latest version, and I should be able to get some cutter time tomorrow.
Update 2: I'm unpleasantly reminded that the process of cutting Mylar film in raster mode on the Epilog, while it works a heck of a lot better than vector mode, is distinctly anisotropic. And here I am trying to produce a pattern involving narrow radial slots that are all supposed to come out exactly the same size.
Grrr. Well, that explains another of the persistent Issues with this project. I've cobbled together another sheet of artwork with various fudge factors applied, and a fairly quick session should product a bunch of things to test. If I can schedule some cutter time today, I should have a handle on the correct fudge factor (as well as several usable parts, hope hope) by closing time.
* A laser cutter, not a giant Epilady used to strip bark from tree trunks.
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