After an electronics project for my family last year that had some last second bugs I thought a more offline gift this year would be better, especially with the glowforge lasercutter purchase. After a few cups of wine and a lot of googling around car ideas I stumbled on this site which makes art pieces using car blueprints laser cut and engraved stacked together to give a bit of depth to them. Searching a bit more I found the-blueprints.com which have a huge variety of car, and other object’s, blueprints for purchase. Scanning the collection I picked two my family would enjoy and got to work on them.
The purchased files were mostly a single layer with a lot of extra lines, shaders, and colors that did not matter as much to me. I carefully worked through each of them in Adobe Illustrator figuring out what each layer of the art would be and pulling those lines out to have the 3 individual layers. The bottom later would mostly be the outline, muffler, and wheel well engrave. The middle layer would have most of the detail. Finally the top layer would just be the side view mirror.
Mimicking the design I found online (and assessing what lasercutting material I had left) I used glowforge’s draftboard material. Glowforge works with a partner to make their own “certified” material that has preset settings to make it easy to get up and go. The draftboard also mimics the look and feel of blueprints so it felt like the perfect material to use.
The entire process was pretty straightforward on the laser cutter, the next step was getting everything to look good in a frame. I picked up a few frames and backing boards from amazon then started to lay everything out. Without adding too much detail I decided to airbrush a small black line that the cars would rest on with a little display card presented below it at a slight angle. Testing out a few different position I finalized on laser cutting a handful of wedges to glue them down on. While simpler looking than past christmas projects I’ve made for family before this might be the one I’m most satisfied in putting my name on and possibly even making more of to sell as well.
