Week 2 — Project Management & Computer-Controlled Cutting

September 16, 2026

What I did

Two assignments this week. First, build this website, which was the project management half. Second, learn the laser cutter by making a parametric construction kit out of cardboard — in my case, a fruit bowl for all the bananas I bring back from the Banana Lounge.

Process

Building this website

I wrote the whole site in VS Code, with Claude helping me on the basic HTML. That is also why it is not very aesthetic for now. The repository lives on Forgejo, and one command publishes the site.

Nothing very hard in this assignment. The one thing I have to stay careful about is photo weight — the pictures coming off my phone are around 10 MB each, so I compress every single one before it goes online. Hopefully the site keeps getting better as the course goes on.

Drawing the bowl

My idea was a modern fruit bowl to hold all the bananas I take from the Banana Lounge, something that could sit in the middle of our table. I asked my three roommates for permission first, and they were down. So I started by drawing what I wanted on paper.

Hand-drawn sketch on lined paper titled Fruit Bowl, showing a notched disc of radius 10 cm and one of the eight 15 cm branches set at 30 degrees — The first sketch: a 10 cm radius disc with eight notches, and a branch leaving it at 30°.

Then I drew it in Fusion as a single 2D sketch driven by parameters: disc radius, arm length, notch depth, number of branches, and cardboard thickness. The bowl is 9 flat parts: one 20 cm disc and 8 identical branches. Every part is one closed outline of lines and arcs, with 5 mm slots — exactly the cardboard thickness — so the pieces interlock without any glue. I exported the sketch as a DXF for the laser cutter.

Laptop screen showing the Fusion 2D sketch: a notched circular disc on the left and eight identical branch profiles laid out side by side on the right — The same thing in Fusion: the disc, and the eight branches nested next to each other, ready to export as a DXF.

Cutting

I cut 3/16 in corrugated cardboard on the Epilog Fusion 40: CO2 laser, focus 0.25, 20% speed, 50% power, 10% frequency, and I assumed a 1 mm kerf. The job came out to about 23 minutes.

Epilog job manager screen showing a CO2 vector process at 20 percent speed, 50 percent power and 10 percent frequency, with a run time of 22 minutes 52 seconds — My settings on the Epilog: CO2 vector, 20 / 50 / 10, one cycle.

Sheet of corrugated cardboard inside the laser cutter with the disc and several branches cut out, the cut edges burned dark brown — All nine parts coming out of the sheet.

Three things went wrong

My sheet of cardboard was slightly bent, and it took me a while to understand that the parts sitting on the bent area were getting burned instead of cut through. Not exactly where you want to put your fruit. I fixed it by taping the sheet down so it stayed flat and the distance to the laser was the same everywhere.

Then the laser simply would not cut through, even after ten passes. I tried several different settings and never found the right one. The shop instructor told me the machine itself was having trouble that day.

And the biggest mistake: I did not account properly for the cardboard thickness and the kerf. The result is that the whole structure is wobbly and does not really stand up.

What I learned

Go and actually measure your material before you draw anything. I designed around a number I assumed rather than a number I had measured, and everything downstream — slot width, kerf compensation, how tight the joints are — depends on it. Next time I measure first, then open Fusion.

The assembled cardboard fruit bowl on a wooden table, eight branches splaying outwards from the central disc, holding two bananas — The final result — it does hold the bananas, but it will need improvement.

Vinyl cutting

The second part of this week was the vinyl cutter. The choice of design started with the material: the lab had a new roll of red vinyl, and I really wanted to use it.

A large roll of glossy red vinyl, wrapped in plastic film, held upright in Victor's hand over a concrete floor — The new red vinyl, the real reason behind this sticker.

Red made me think of the MIT Graduate Student Union, which I am part of as a TA at Sloan, so I made its logo as a sticker. I found the logo on the internet and turned it into an SVG so that the cutter had proper vectors to follow. Some of the writing was too small for that, and it is the part of the sticker that came out worst.

Pulling off the vinyl I did not want, around the fist.

The finished red MIT Graduate Student Union sticker on its backing, with a fist holding up a row of columns, next to the leftover red vinyl and the tiny cut-out letters scattered on a white sheet — The sticker, and all the little letters that had to come out one by one.

I still have not decided where to put it.