Laser Cutting Girih Tiles

Years after the idea of laser cutting Girih Tiles I attended a laser cutter workshop.

I decided to build upon an existing file rather than using my own old SketchUp files, because of two features:

Engraving and the ‘Teeth’ pattern on the sides.

You can find the file for laser cutting girih tiles in the blog of Johanna Grönqvist.

I had problems to use this file with the software, that came with the laser cutter. Most tiles where absolute correct, but a few did not have the engraving filled. I tried exporting different file formats including PDF, EPS and DXF. With DXF nothing was filled.
The next try was not using that laser software, that could not read PDF correctly. Instead I used just the Windows printer driver to access the laser cutter from the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can certainly read PDF files correctly. The preview in the print dialog looked OK, but the first output was a big failure. The output had a wrong aspect ratio and wrong scale. So the result was completely unusable.

For the second try I only changed the dimensions of the PDF to the working area of the laser cutter (600 mm x 300 mm), without rescaling the content of the drawing.

And that finally worked well.