Flexible laser cut Cristmas tree ornaments

thingiverse

Visitors to FabLab are always amazed by flexible wood. It is possible to make wood flexible without breaking by laser cutting special patterns into it. Aaron Porterfield has created an instructable featuring various patterns for creating flexible wood at Instructables (http://www.instructables.com/id/Curved-laser-bent-wood/). The flexibility of the wood depends on its thickness, the shape of the pattern, and the size of the pattern. You can read more about the physics of flexible materials on Deferred Procrastination's blog (http://www.deferredprocrastination.co.uk/blog/category/def-proc/lattice-hinges/). I recently created flexible Christmas ornaments for my Christmas tree. We need to understand general geometry and flexibility patterns to achieve this. I will cut these ornaments from 3mm MDF material. If you want to create flexibility patterns for other materials or varying thicknesses, experimentation with the pattern dimensions is required. The patterns I designed can be viewed at my blog (http://make.petervdb.be/2015/12/23/flexible-christmas-ornaments/) using Inkscape software.