Beta project 16 (Hover Pucks)

I was curious about making very small features with the Glowforge, and I needed an excuse to make them, so… Hoverpucks™!

These are little balloon powered toy hovercraft.

I constructed them by stacking up cut rings of acrylic and gluing it all together.

The air is released out of a ring of tiny .01” holes cut into the bottom.

Here is a much larger array of these holes, that was useless for a hoverpuck, but is still interesting for a number of other applications.

It makes me think of filter plates for processing precipitates in chemistry, or a vacuum chuck for holding down flat things, or air bearings or any number of other places where an even grid of tiny holes would be needed.

I also learned about annealing acrylic to release the stresses induced by laser cutting.

Normally when you cut and then put solvent glue on acrylic, it almost immediately starts to show tiny hairline cracks as the surface softens. If left alone these cracks significantly weaken a large structure since they form lots of points of failure under load.

According to what I have read, if you first anneal the plastic in an oven at 230F it releases the internal stress and allows you to glue the parts without cracking.

For a lot more info… PMMA – Americas

It is definitely worth a try! These cracks gave me a major headache when I was making these:

Anyway this was a fun diversion.

Video (maybe too long) included for further information and a brief demo…