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I'm Rachel McKnight and I design and make contemporary jewellery and home wear using
polypropylene and Perspex. And I incorporate laser cutting into both of those sides of
the business.
The first stage usually either starts on paper and you can also scan in and trace around
a drawing that you've done. My machine has it's own software but I can also input adobe
illustrator and auto cad files as well and they will directly import straight into the
machine with, with no problems or anything.
Once the design is on the computer I usually do like a test cut just to see, size wise,
you know, is it going to work out, and, and everything like that.
If it is a smaller kind of piece that I'm going to go into production with I always
like to check out how many I can cut in an hour, how many I can get from a sheet, and
work out my costs that way to see how cost effective it's going to be.
The reaction to the laser cutting is brilliant, it's really really good. When I first kind
of started selling my work people were intrigued that I was using plastics and things and,
you know, they couldn't really maybe get their head around it but it's definitely, over the
years, it's gotten much much better. It's usually men, actually, who are really interested
in the laser cutting and the technical side, you know, the women are more, "Oh, it's beautiful,
it's a lovely piece, but the men are "Oh, how's it made, how's it cut?"
That's a great thing that you can be able to talk about the technology and how that
it's cut out. You can cut within a millimetre of the detail basically, so, um, you can cut
really really intricate shapes and designs, so that's, I mean the lace works brilliantly.
And I can cut really really tiny, I mean, I make pendants and things which are quite
small and have really small pieces.
At school I loved art and to be honest all I ever wanted to do was art, but I never really
thought of it as a career, really, at the end of it. The challenges at the beginning
were basically dealing with new technology and new machinery -- I was OK with computers
and things growing up but this was something a little bit more specialised.
The technology basically is a set of mirrors so there is a laser beam sent down the side
of the machine, which is then -- bounces off one mirror and sends it to the mirror on the
arm of the machine, that's the one that kind of moves about and does all the cutting. So
it gets sent to that mirror which then gets pointed; directed down to do the cutting.
My laser cutter can cut pretty much anything apart from metal, you need a special laser
cutter to do that because of the reflections from metal. So what I generally cut, I've
you know, you can cut paper, card, plywood, I've cut MDF and polypropylene, Perspex. The
laser cutter kind of helps my business and it's more cost effective because I can produce
things much faster. Once a design is done it's saved on the computer and it can de re-done.
But you can also use the same design and modify it in different ways quite quickly, but it's
really just the speed and the finish that you get from using the laser cutter as well
is incredible. I mean, it cuts Perspex or acrylic incredibly well, you get a really
pristine cut and finish on the edges and you really don't need to do a lot of other work
cleaning up afterwards, which is a huge benefit and time saving for me, really, as a designer.
The technology is incredible, it's really a benefit and it has really benefited my business
and changed my business.