"Laser cut MDF plans" Topic

Does anyone know of anyone that sells building plans, rather than finished product? I've got the laser printer and just want to buy the plans.

I would have thought architectural plans would be of use? May need rescaling but there should be a lot out there?

I think lasers need to become a little more prolific before that happens. You can check Thingiverse but I've never seen building plans up there.

I for one would never sell my plans. Its my IP and I don't give that up easily.

It also gets tricky because every laser is different. Straight MDF is probably not a big issue. You just have to compensate for your laser wattage.

I well understand the desire to protect intellectual property.
I think you end up with a split akin to paper modeling. Some sell printed sheets, others sell the pdfs.

Selling printed pdfs gives you pure profit but leaves you vulnerable to illicit copies

Selling the printed sheets makes you deal with the purchase and processing of raw materials but protects your intellectual property.
The cost to the ordinary gamer of a laser would be too much to make it worth it for most people – for the moment. If I could get the local gamers to chip in, then a laser might be feasible. Feasible only if plans were available – eventually I would expect to be able to find them from someone off of Wargamers vault

I'd expect to eventually see some free ones pop up from people with lasers who did the work and have no intention of making money from it.

However, Lasers a different then printing paper. You can't really design buildings without a laser. You can outsource. I did it for years but designing something complex like a building takes 2-3 revisions at least. It gets pricing and takes forever to get the cuts back.

If you do have a laser then you can't make enough money just selling the patterns to compensate for the equipment costs. Most of the profits are generated from the laser time.

Granted some will have a hobby laser or access to a makerspace with one. So they might want to do some cutting for and design a building without wanting to start a business around it. It would be much more profitable to contact someone like me or Gamecrafters and offer to sell the design outright or setup a royalty. Profit is lower but your market is vastly larger.

Even if lasers drop to around $500 USD or even $250 USD your still not going to see much market penetration. It's not like a printer. They are noisy, messy, and take a good deal of maintenance. Lot more work then even you average wood working tools.

When you say "laser" do you mean like a laser engraving machine?

cheers

Jaz
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Thanks for the responses.

6sided: I've no idea what kind of a laser cutter it is. It's at work and I have access to it. All I know is that it did a fine job cutting through 5mm plywood to make these 1' terrain tiles we designed for our Song of Drums and Shakos play:

imgur.com/a/GSPE3

I expect that the future of home fabrication will be similar to printing; either people will fab at home or at a local shop. If we get there then there'll be a high margin .AI file market. But until then I guess I'm on my own to adapt papercraft building designs.

Yes by laser we are talking about a laser cutter (or engraving machine). Never understood that terminology. To me a laser engraver is either the industrial high speed ones used to etch markings into metal or the small 15-30 watt machines that can't really cut much due to low wattage. If it cuts 3mm MDF then I call it a laser cutter.

Home fabrication is coming but it will be slowly adopted and the main issue right now is software. However, I don't think you'll see lasers take off as wide spread as 3d printing. 3d printing can easily be made hands off. Laser cutting is dangerous and doesn't make a nice appliance. We will see more DIY shops with them. It will be equivalent to a table saw but 3D printing is going to be the most popular method.