Springtime Fun: Creating a Butterfly from Laser Cut Wood

With spring around the corner, the days getting longer, and the temperature climbing, I thought it could be fun to do something inspired by the end of winter. I thought the perfect thing to cut would be a layered butterfly.

Importing a Picture into SolidWorks to Design

To begin my design, I didn’t want to start completely from scratch as a butterfly has well defined characteristics. To start with, I decided to grab a stock image from Google and import that into SolidWorks. I ended on a standard monarch butterfly.

In order to import into SolidWorks, I first downloaded and saved the picture to my computer. SolidWorks has a great importing feature in order to sketch whatever picture you would like to. On the main upper toolbar, I went to Tools -> Sketch Tools -> Sketch Picture. This imports the picture directly into the workspace and opens up a sketch automatically. From there I resized the photo so that the span of the butterfly’s wings was about 150mm wide. This would give me an overall design in the size I was looking for. Next, it was onto tracing the picture.

Tracing the Imported Picture

Like the picture, I wanted to have good symmetry across the midpoint of the butterfly, so I decided to start with drawing in a centerline to eventually mirror all my sketching across. I then we to begin tracing the outer edges of the feature I wanted to capture. I did this by drawing segmented splines around the butterfly’s wings, head, and antenna to end up with a sketch something like this:

In the picture above, I ended up trimming out the body that was to the left side of the centerline. I also ended up offsetting the antenna by 2mm to get a solid feature that could be mirrored and chose the internal wing coloring that I wanted to mirror too. With the outer edge wing tracing I did something similar to the with the wing coloring by using a spline technique. I went around the outer edge of each feature with a spline and went back over and fit each “circle” to its correct sizing. Finally, I added in a spline for the separation between the upper and lower wings to help me later on with cutting the final shapes as well. After all the tracing was complete, I ended up with this to mirror:

Then with the magic of SolidWorks and the mirror entities tool from the top sketch toolbar, I got a full drawing like this:

Creating the 3D Parts for the Final Model

I wanted to create a little dimension to the figurine, so I went with a three-layer design. I decided on a base layer that included cuts for the bottom wing coloring. A middle layer that had the top wings, body and cutouts for the coloring in the top wings. Finally, a simple top layer with the body of the butterfly. In order to take advantage of the fact that I had already traced out what I wanted, I ended up copying the above full trace into three different files. From there I ended up deleting whatever wouldn’t be used and saving the rest for each file to cut down on redrawing features. However, upon deleting things, I found that the splines weren’t behaving well and was creating a sketch that wasn’t closed. This wouldn’t let me extrude out the sketch to move into an Assembly. You’ll notice that a sketch isn’t closed if the sketched in area is not dark. In the above picture you can see the dark portions of the sketch would be valid to extrude a feature, but the light portions would not.

To fix this I needed to go in and manually reattach some of the endpoints. To help me with this I used a nice tool that SolidWorks provides. Under the top toolbar Tools -> Sketch Tools -> Check Sketch for Feature…, I was able to select and zoom in on the portions of the sketch that were not connected. Once I was able to identify the parts of the sketch that weren’t attached, I grabbed the endpoints and connected them. I ended up using the outer edge as an extruded boss/base feature with 3mm thickness to simulate my wood material. The inner portions that would be cut I used an extruded cut feature. I ended up getting the final parts seen here:

Creating the 3D Butterfly Assembly

Now comes the fun part of assembling the three parts together into an assembly to get a final idea of what the full figurine will look like. To do that I imported each of the three parts into a new assembly file in SolidWorks. This is basically just a preview, so I wasn’t too concerned with what mates to make. For the bottom to middle part, I used the outer edge of the upper wings to mate. One on each side so the parts wouldn’t rotate. For the middle to top part, I used the under edge of the antennae. Again, using one on each side of the pieces so there was no part-to-part rotation. This resulted in a final assembly that I thought would be pretty cool to cut:

One thing to note, I had some trouble when importing parts. For some reason one of them came in crooked and resulted in my views getting out of whack. In order to reset them, I selected the butterfly body to edit the sketch to pull me into a desired front view. Once I was there, I hit spacebar and updated the standard views making the current view the front view. This realigned my model to the way I wanted it and let me move on to moving the model to LightBurn.

Moving the Model to LightBurn and Cutting

The quickest way I’ve found to move models into LightBurn is by performing a bulk save of the parts in SolidWorks as .dxf files and that can be found in my post “How to Quickly Import into LightBurn from SolidWorks”. I ended up importing in the .dxf files into LightBurn and arranging them to be cut with a pattern like this:

I like to do two different layers for my permanent cutouts. Layer 0 are the black lines and Layer 1 are the blue lines. I do this so that the inner cuts are sure to be completely cut through and the outer cuts can be popped off by hand. Here are the settings I use on my 40W XTool Pro for 3mm wood:

• Layer 0 – 100% power, 22 mm/s, 2 passes
• Layer 1 – 100% power, 22 mm/s, 3 passes

Now here is where the project derailed itself for a little bit. After transferring to cut, and running my laser, I had issues with the gaps left in between the holes. I also had issues where my laser didn’t have the settings right to cut all the way through some dense glue patches in my layered wood. I ended up with a failed cut:

No problem though! Sometimes the first iteration doesn’t go as planned and the only thing to do is to go back to the drawing board. I had ideas for some improvements. There were two main issues I needed to tackle and each had their own solution. First, I tackled the issue of the holes in the wings being too close. To fix this, in the upper wings I removed a few cuts, spaced them out further, and included a slight inward offset on the kerf adjustment. For the lower wings I made the cuts a little smaller, spaced them out, and included a slight inward offset on the kerf. Second, I changed the settings on the outside cut layer, Layer 0 from above, and included a third pass to make sure I cut through the wood completely. I also added a couple 1mm tabs around the outer edge so that the parts wouldn’t fall away from the wood when the cut was complete. I was back in front of my laser with a new design in no time. And I think the quick edits paid off!

Post Processing and Conclusion

With the final cut parts, I ended up doing some sanding to clean up the pieces a bit. Sometimes I like the little bit of burn just to have the character of the wood, but don’t want to leave them scorched. The final thing to do was to simply glue the layers together. I used some typical wood glue and clamped the pieces together to set. With that I got my springtime butterfly!

I hope you enjoyed the journey for the springtime butterfly and maybe even learned something along the way!

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