For this week we spent a couple of mins in the workshop familiarising ourselves with a few tools that maybe useful for us for our project.
The tools that we were trained on was:
Drill press
Drills
Bandsaw
For my grid pattern prototype here’s what I first came up with for laser cutting using the Wintergarden window as a reference
First try (Polystyrene clear plastic) 
First try (Polystyrene clear plastic) 
Second try (Cardboard) 
Second try (Cardboard) 
Second try (Cardboard) 
Third try (Acrylic) 
Third try (Acrylic)
Using the scrap material that the lab has I first found this polystyrene clear plastic that looks very identical to the actual glass window from the glasshouse especially with the condensation on the window making it barely visible for people to see inside the glasshouse. However laser cutting this was difficult as it was plastic therefore I would have the tendancy to bend when it comes in touch with hear, ruining the pattern I have created. The second material was cardboard, I liked how you can control how much power you give to the machine causing this weird pattern that you can see through it and see the silhouettes. Last and finally acrylic for the transparency purpose and wouldn’t bend unlike my first experiment.
When raster etching on any material it creates this nice effect at the back of the material depending on how powerful you tell the machine to engrave onto the material
Angel 