Circles Within Circle - Enlargeable Pattern

Being a frequent user of lasercut machines, I started to gather rounded scrap wood from drilled holes in my designs. I first tried to gather them to form this rounded form as a DIY drinks coaster. I liked the design so I've decided to give the project another dimension.

1. Plywood (any thickness, I use 4mm due to lasercut machine power constraint)
2. A lasercut machine (or the help of a dedicated company)
3. FreeCAD or any software allowing to draw pattern and export them in .dxl file format
4. nothing else

Follow the above step to enter in the drawing mode

Get familiar with the above presented command, drawing a circle, use of "tangent" tool, split the lines.

1/ The idea is to fill a circle with other circles(what better use of pi ? 😁), the result will be engraved on the wood, these circles are the dotted blue ones on the first picture.

2/ A second drawing aims to draw the same concentric circles with a slight increase in diameter. These circles are the white ones on the first picture. For these circles the idea is to discard the intersection of the curves - see the discarded part in green on the first picture-. The result i.e the remaining white circles will this time be cut by the machine.

This allow the pattern to look like circles while keeping a bound in between them to ensure the overall assembly resistance.

Note that since it's made from a pattern, it can be easily enlarged and used for other purposes.

Enjoy !

As always, if you enjoyed reading this article or felt inspired, please consider buying a coffee 😊