I make business cards out of cutoffs (waste material) and with my vinyl clock project I wound up with extra vinyl.

Here’s the latest version.

The spindle is a 45 to 33 rpm conversion for LP records. It’s also has a little hole so it’s actually a pendant.

Cutting Records with Laser

This is the wrong thing to do. Vinyl (PVC or Polyvinyl chloride), when heated produces some corrosive and highly poisonous gases. It’s bad for the laser and it’s bad for people. The off-gas includes gaseous hydrochloric acid and other nasty things which will condense on your laser optics, bearings, your lungs and other important things.

Cutting Records with CNC Machine

This proved to be a bit tricky and time consuming. Records are actually fairly inconsistent in thickness, hardness and other properties. They can act brittle one minute and then melt and give off poisonous gasses the next.

I then did a record clock project which gave me a bit of practice and I can now do this fairly well.

CNC Fixture

It’s very tedious clamping and un-clamping a record to a CNC table. To solve this challenge I made a fixture that could be clamped to the bed that would allow me to quickly change records.

What I came up with was a three part system.

Here’s what it looks like cutting vinyl. You can see some of my CNC machines cuttings stuff.

This has evolved considerably:

Related

Cool Vinyl Clocks

Jewellery from CD and Vinyl

Article published on June 11, 2013