Digital Programming For Artists

As artists, over the years we have often needed the services of digital cutting machines, namely waterjets, plasma cutters, lasers, plotters and more. When your cutting needs require precision and repeatability or when cutting materials such as thick glass, metal or stone, there simply is no other reasonable alternative to using these computerized devices.

This is where we come in. When we first started we quickly realized three things.

1) Most machine programmers are not artists.

2) Most artists are not machine programmers.

3) If we wanted to get what we really wanted, we had to learn to program these machines ourselves.

Now, as artists we can offer you our services and decade plus experience so you won't have to learn CAD programming for digital cutting devices, which is quite a bit different than just creating a vector drawing! We know how to adapt each design to the specific parameters of the various cutting devices. Let us help you next you have artwork you need to cutout using any of these digital devices.

Send us your ideas/requirements and we'll give you a free quote. Although we do also program technical/machine parts (+ or - 0.00001"accuracy) most of our work is more artistic.

Click here to see an example of starting with a pencil sketch and following through to a finished granite and marble floor medallion.

LASERS

Lasers cut by using highly focused beams of culminated light and are generally most accurate and have the smallest curf (cut width). They are mostly used for thin materials (about an inch or less, depending on material). Lasers are great cutting devices for the right material. Steel for example, cuts very well with extreme accuracy and lasers cut steel so fast that there is no other way to compete. Lasers, however, are also limited in what they can cut and are unable to cut such non-Ferris (non-iron containing) metal items as aluminum, brass, silver, gold, glass, stone, etc... For that you need a waterjet.

WATERJETS

Waterjets cut by using ultra high pressure water (50,000+psi) which is mixed with abrasive grit and shot through a tiny nozzle at three times the speed of sound. Waterjets are in some cases almost as accurate as lasers and have the additional advantage of being cool, so the parts never reach a temperature of more than boiling, unlike the thousands of degrees developed by laser cutting. Waterjets can also cut through stacks of material yielding more economical cutting than cutting one sheet at a time. Furthermore, waterjets can cut just about anything up to a foot or so thick. Steel, stainless steel, hardened tool steel, carbide, aluminum, brass, copper, gold, silver, glass, stone, plastic, wood, rubber, fabric, paper (the cutting process happens so quickly, the paper never gets wet), and even (using coconut oil instead of water and leaving out the grit) chocolate brownies!

PLASMA CUTTERS

Plasma cutters cut by using an extremely hot oxygen flame to melt it's way through the material. Although not as accurate as a laser, plasma cutters burn through steel almost as fast as a laser and since the machines about one hundred times less, expect the parts to cost less too. Finally as an artist, much of the time the accuracy is not critical and a plasma jet works great for cutting steel into just about any imaginable shape!

PLOTTERS

Plotters are X-Y devices, like the cutting machines discussed above, which either use a pen for drawing (example: plans like blueprints) or are fitted with a cutting knife and are used to cut soft materials like mask for sign makers, painters, sandblasters, etc.

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