I recently got a new 3d printer (Ender 3) and completely stopped using the old one (Wanhao duplicator i3 plus). I decided to strap a 450nm 2.5W laser module I had to the carriage of the duplicator and laser cut some gaskets for the auxiliary air control valve (AAC) on my Z.

I did my modeling in Fusion360 and exported DXFs to Inkscape. In Inkscape I used the Photonics plugin to convert the DXF into Gcode. Below are the files I generated. Note: I have a 1986 Nissan 300zx turbo, I’m not sure how much the gaskets may vary between models.

https://a360.co/2TqZX47

https://a360.co/2T94QiM

I had to work through some issues to get a workflow going. First is that you should NOT use spline lines if you want to export to Inkscape. So I had to redo my models with circles and lines and no spline lines. Second was the dimensions seemed to change for some reason when importing into Inkscape. So when importing I found I had to set the scaling factor to 1.06.

After that everything was pretty smooth. At full laser power I was able to cut at 750 mm/min and have pretty clean cutting. The paper gasket material I got at autozone was about 0.4mm thick. I tried cutting some black rubbery 0.8mm gasket material I got off amazon but didn’t have a lot of luck. The composition is very different and even at slow feed rates it didn’t completely cut through.



