"Bring Us Your Ideas"

"Bring us your ideas" is a bit of a tagline that we have used at the vendor shows that we have been a part of.

Well, at our last show - earlier this month - someone did just that!

We were approached by a man who had a project underway and he was looking for some help.  He said he had taken an old phone and was making it into a Bluetooth music player, as a going away gift.  Things had gone a bit off the rails and he was wondering if we could help.

Later that day, he brought his project over.

Originally he had asked about us doing a cover or modification to the wooden face plate that he had, but in the end he decided to have us make a new plate altogether.  He gave us a drawing of how he wanted the finished piece to look.

Jeff set to work with a micrometer and AutoCAD.  We cut a few test pieces out of paper, until the placement was just right.

Then the requested images and text were added and this is what it looked like.

The lettering was a bit hard to read in certain lighting situations.  This is a problem we've had with this wood/stain combination.  So I decided to try a technique I'd read about, but not yet tried: color fill.

The process was fairly easy, but very time consuming and tedious!  However, I think it was worth it.

A comparison of our first plate, alongside the color-filled one.

The customer came to pick up the finished job last night and he loved it!  This was certainly a first, in a lot of ways: our first fabricated from scratch custom ordered piece and the first time doing color fill.

I see a lot of color fill in my future.  It adds several steps and quite a bit of time to the finished product, but the results are certainly worth it!

Hello! Long Time No Post!

Much apologies for the long period in-between blog posts.  Here's a quick recap of the last several months:


* The Stock Show was a good time; we met a lot of people, made some new business contacts, completed quite a few custom orders, and of course: sold some things.  In the sales department, we didn't do as well as we'd hoped, but not as bad as we'd feared - if that makes any sense.

* We took our first large custom order near the end of the Stock Show.  The order was fulfilled in April, after working through the design period, materials testing, laser work, and assembly of the finished products.  The order was for 220 leather coasters, attached to discs of rock salt that the customer provided.  They were done as souvenirs for an International conference that was to be held in the area in May.  From what we had heard of the event, it's possible that several of our pieces are now scattered around the world!  Which brings us to...

* Right after that order was completed, the laser and the rest of our household was packed up and shipped to...  Japan.

* We moved to Japan in late May, due to Jeff's "day job" in the Air Force.  We will be here for the next four years.  So far, we are loving it!

* Our household goods were delivered in July, we are still in the process of getting fully settled in to our new home.

* In the past week, I have finally unpacked all of our leftover inventory from the stock show.  I am in the process of quality checks, categorizing, doing inventory, and working on getting some of the items listed online.

* The laser itself is still offline at the moment, but it is our plan to get everything hooked up to have it up and running again this weekend.


Whew!  That should bring everyone up to speed on what's been going on over the last several (exciting) months.  Stay tuned for more updates as our laser business rumbles back to life!

Supply orders

Well, I just got off the phone after making three large supply orders for the approaching Stock Show.  As soon as the ton of wood and other parts arrive, it'll be all laser, all the time for the next couple of weeks leading up to the event.  There is quite a bit of software editing I need to do in getting files prepped to print, so that should keep me busy until our orders get here.  And we do still have some leftovers from our last supply orders that I can use up. 

There is still so much to get done.  The biggest concern is that we need to get cracking on a design for our booth.  To date we've only attended two (small) events where we offered laser goods for sale. 

The space we used was less than half a table at the first one..

...and a full table at the second one.

They were shared events, the real focus at the event was the model horse show going on.  We just had a sales table, in addition to model horses for display and show. 

Coming up we have a full on Trade Show where we have an 8'x8' booth to fill.  I want us to have a nice setup, but as of right now we have nothing, except the laser-cut holders that Jeff made for our first events.  We will probably do more of those - they are a great and space efficient way to hold a lot of pieces, plus they allow people to flip through and look at all of the designs. 

However, we also want to have a lot of things hanging up, to catch people's eye, and to be able to display more designs.  Being trade show newbies means we have nothing readily available.  I know there are companies that make "trade show displays" but 1) I'm not sure we want to spend the money on them and 2) I'm not sure we have time to get something like that ordered.  Also, this will probably be the only big event that we go to for the foreseeable future, so do we really want some sort of huge display racks kicking around the rest of the year?  I am going to do some investigating though. 

I think maybe we will end up trying to fabricate something - after all, we have a LASER cutter! - but I don't want our booth to look cobbled together either.  We'll see...  I'm going to investigate some ready-made options today and if that doesn't seem like it will work, then we need to get busy on designing our own display racks/stands.

So much to do!

Lasering the day away

The Black Hills Stock Show is fast approaching and there is a lot to be done.

Today I am working on dialing in the settings on our laser, hoping to maximize output and minimize time spent.  I've done this before, but we recently did a deep clean of the machine along with some recommended extended maintenance and I'm curious to see if we can get better performance out of it than what we've been seeing lately.  So far so good.

Working on some desktop tributes

At the Stock Show, the primary items we'll have on display will be the wooden tributes and ornaments, though we are hoping to have some new products developed and ready by then as well.  Both Jeff and I are overflowing with ideas of things to make and pretty much the only limits are our imagination. 

Though we are slightly limited by the size of our machine - it has a 12 x 24 inch table - but there are many people out there who think "outside the box".  They make much larger items by lasering smaller pieces and then assembling them together to make something huge.  I'm sure at some point we'll experiment with similar challenges.

For now, it's all smaller scale woodworking, all the time!

Welcome to our blog

Welcome to the brand new blog for Cut By Light, LLC. 

We are a small laser cutting and engraving service, based out of western South Dakota.

The machine we have allows us to work with a variety of different materials: wood, glass, plastic, acrylic, paper, cardboard, and some metal (etching only).

Our introductory product line is a series of wooden tributes and ornaments, celebrating a love of dogs and horses.  We have a wide variety of dog and horse breeds and horseback scenes available.    All items can be fully personalized with text or even engraved pictures.

Wall Tribute - American Staffordshire Terrier

Desktop Tribute - Barrel Racer custom

Ornament - Greyhound

The biggest news to start off 2015 is that we will have a vendor booth at the 2015 Black Hills Stock Show.  We are hard at work preparing for our debut at a major trade show.

Feel free to contact us if there's anything you think we can help you with.  Our e-mail address is: customerservice@cutbylight.com

You can also find us on Facebook here:  Cut By Light LLC on Facebook

And be sure to stay tuned to this blog as we share our journey into the exciting world of laser cutting and engraving!