Laser cut tree

I created this mini tree silhouette for a good friend of mine who has a fondness for all of nature, but trees in particular. It wasn’t an overly-involved project, taking only a weekend from start to finish, but I like the simplicity of it. It stands roughly 8" tall and 10" wide in both the X and Y dimensions.

I used a downloaded image of a simple tree outline as my starting point. Within Illustrator, I cleaned it up a bit, converted it to a vectored path, and duplicated it since I’d need two different halves. Using a bit of eyeballing and manual measuring with the screen rulers, I chopped a vertical rectangle out of one image from the base to around three-quarters of the way up the trunk. This half would be the one that was fit over the top of the second.

With the second image, I needed to create a clear path straight down from the top through the branches that was the same width as the thickness of the wood. This would allow the first piece to slip straight down through the middle when rotated 90º from the first. I knew this would be a quick cut and wasn’t worried about wasting wood, so I just needed the dimensions to be Close Enough™ to hopefully work on the first shot.

The cut for both trees only took about 5 minutes on one of the Epilog lasercutters in the Autodesk Pier 9 shop, and once it was done it was super easy to pop out and slide together. There’s a tiny bit of wiggle room between the top piece’s cutout and the width of the bottom piece, but negligible in terms of structural integrity.