Laser Cutting your own structures

​As part of the mine shaft tutorial video I’ll be designing and building a whole bunch of mining structures and equipment to populate the mine. For most of these structures I’ll be using Corel DRAW x8 to design the buildings and I’ll then be using the GY430 Laser Cutter to create the necessary parts for assembly.

​So far, I haven’t designed a whole lot however I have managed to design and cut the mine elevator structure, it was basically a test as a proof of concept and now I know it works and looks quite good I’ll be refining the design and adding the finer details to make it look even better.

​The structure is about 99% laser cut with only a very small amount of styrene rod used to hold the large wheel atop the structure. 

​A variety of material was used, 3mm MDF makes up the main frame, 1.5mm pine plywood makes up the supports and cross beams, 1.0mm birch plywood makes up the decking on top of the structure and 0.5mm birch plywood makes the wheel at the top.

​I was pleasantly surprised at how well the wheel turned out, when I received the 0.5mm plywood I was amazed at how thin it actually was and was concerned about how much structural integrity it would have. It’s so thin that you can cut it with a pair of good scissors! Being able to cut it with scissors actually makes it very easy to work with especially when cutting sections to be placed in the laser cutter. The 0.5mm plywood even though it is very thin it has a good amount of structural integrity and not only that it is very flexible which will make it ideal for curved structures (something I’ll be experimenting with in the near future).

​If you’re wondering where I got the idea of this model I found it by randomly searching through google images, I searched for ‘old mine elevator structure’ and eventually came across this image.

​Obviously I didn’t have any dimensions however I did have that small trolley visible in the foreground to work from and those red bricks that form the base look like standard sized bricks. With those items giving me something to start with I simply guessed the rest until I had something that looked reasonably close to what I wanted.

I’m not modelling the structure to be exact because I’ve added in cross beams for visual interest.

​To give you an idea of scale, here is the elevator structure with a HO scale vehicle and a 2cm tall HO scale man standing next to the building.

Those two sheave wheels sitting in the back of the truck were also made on the laser cutter using 0.5mm birch plywood.

I will eventually be making the plans for this building and the smaller sheave wheels available to be downloaded on the laser cutting section of my website, I still plan to make some miner adjustments to the finished design so once they have been made and I’m happy with the final product I’ll make them available.
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However, for those interested below are the current drawings so far for the structure: