More baskets

Encouraged by my Etsy milestones, I have continued to add laser design files to my shop. These have included some huge bundles of stacked basket designs and a few new spiral basket designs. With stacked baskets, via some crafty design shortcuts, I was able to quickly crank out about 60 symmetric polygon shaped designs ranging from 3 points to 22 points. In these designs, there is a tradeoff between practical basket volume vs truly interesting shapes. Simply put, it all boils down to the depth of contour in the design. Designs with minimal contour have high volume while those with high degrees of contour look fantastic but tend to hold less. Thus, I have been cranking out both sorts.

High Contour, Low Volume Triangle ( i.e. 3-point) Basket:

High volume, low contour basket design

I also added a heart shaped basket (heart shaped box some might say) which probably pushed how thin a ring I could cut and stack. I missed valentine’s day on this one but I like it.

On the spiral basket front, I recently received a request from an Etsy customer for a larger sized spiral basket design. This dude had a big laser so he wanted something on the order of 16 inches in diameter. That is well beyond the size my laser can handle without using the passthrough feature (wherein it cuts the design in sections and you move the material between sectional cuts). This request captured my interest and thusly I did crank out a biggy design and cut it with the passthrough feature. It worked better than I had thought it would. Practically speaking, I scaled the design up to larger dimensions and then adjusted all the interlocking bits (legs, center and rim) back to a size that matches the expected wood thickness. Here is is cut out of Baltic Birch.

Huge Round Dual Spiral Basket

This got me thinking about the current spiral basket design and if there were any possible improvements to be made. The current design is based on a pair of spirals that are interlinked running from rim to center and forming a symmetric set of spirals . You can see those 2 spirals in the huge basket design above. I made a new design that uses the same idea but used 4 spirals vs the 2 used in the original. These spirals each have half as many turns so the result is the same number of spirals and the same width across the spirals. This can be seen in the image below. It looks much the same but is a more robust structure because each spiral spans a much shorter total length between rim and center and is less prone to bending as a result. I have posted this in both a large oval and a large spiral design to my Etsy shop. Both of those work with current glowforge capacity. I also posted a design for a larger basket that requires the passthrough feature to be used. I really like these quad spiral designs.

Quad spiral basket design. Round.