Fred Aldous Report

Fred Aldous Laser Cutting Facility
Fred Aldous Ltd
37 Lever Street
Manchester
M1 1LW
www.fredaldous.co.uk


Fred Aldous is a design, craft and art supplies in Manchester, they offer laser cutting services to local designers.

Files for laser cutting need to be Illustrator files (.ai) and saved at version 8.
As long as you have the appropriate format the set up cost is £5 and the cutting services are charged at £1.00 per minute. A higher charge is incurred if Fred Aldous needs to amend the illustrator file if it’s not compatible to the laser cutter.

Cutting with the laser was a simple and quick process, all of our designs were put onto disc and sent to the laser cutter, approx 8 designs were sent at the same time and it took about 10 minutes to cut (£10). The image above is of my design, it was tested on (top L-R) wood and felt, (bottom L-R) card and plastic mirror.

The laser cutter was able to pick up quite fine detail, but probably no less than 2mm in width would work as the fibres would burn through. As you can see with the wood, it burnt slightly in the laser cutter, this is alright if you'd like to incorporate that into the design. Also to take into account is that the felt comes out just a shade darker after being exposed to the heat.
There are 7 other fabrics you could laser with such as, plastics, foam, cloths (leather,suede, hemp, cotton), magnetic sheets, papers, rubbers and Teflon ranging in types.

I learnt that it is best to stick strictly to Illustrator when it comes to working with a programme that only deals with Illustrator, as I has produced a design in Illustrator in a 'Special Effects' mode which enabled me to open and work with it in Photoshop too. As it has been dragged into Photoshop instead of opened via Illustrator into Photoshop it lost it's quality, pixalating it. When it came to laser cutting my image the programme found it difficult to read and it had to be amended but it still wasn't right, this left the outcome of my designs unsmooth around the edges particulary on the plastic mirror, but this is something I now know not to do.

Overall the outcome was successful, despite the error in my design as it gave me an understanding of what the laser cutter could do. There is a vast scope as to why and how you would use the laser cutting technique. Laser cutting is a quick, simple and relatively cheap method of producing design outcomes on almost any surface fabric, it can also laser cut on to already acrylic printed fabrics,