Laser Cut Kinetic Sculptures 🦿, Stencil fonts in Cuttle 🏝️

Here's the latest with Cuttle.

• New template and tutorial video: make a laser cut “Walking Man” kinetic toy
• See more mechanical automata by Federico in the latest live stream recording
• New Stencil category in the font picker
• Improvements to the Name Snowflake template

“Walking Man” Mechanical Automaton 🦿

Federico created this kinetic sculpture that you can cut on your laser cutter. His tutorial video walks you through cutting and assembly.

Several years ago, Federico shared a free cut file to make a similar kinetic toy, but he was frustrated that the design was tuned for a very specific material thickness. If your material was a different size, the pieces wouldn’t quite fit together or spin properly.

This new template lets you specify the thickness of your material to generate a cut file with a perfect fit.

Federico also worked in a few more improvements in this latest iteration of the “Walking Man”. He took us behind the scenes on the latest live stream.

Stencil Fonts 🏝️

The font picker now has a “Stencil” category.

When you cut out text in normal fonts, you lose the "islands" in letters like abde...

Stencil fonts have "bridges" to the islands so you don't lose them when cutting.

Shoutout to Cuttle user @cleversomeday for suggesting this feature and compiling the stencil fonts from Google Fonts (the free fonts that come with Cuttle). Also check out her blog for lots of great info on Cricut, Silhouette, and plotting!

Name Snowflake Improvements ❄️

I added a rotation parameter to the Name Snowflake template.

This gives you even more options to change the look of your snowflake. It can also be useful when your name has “descenders” — letters that go below the baseline like jpqy. See the example above.

I also made some other improvements to this design which make it perform faster (that is, respond more quickly to your changes).

Live Streams 🗼

We’re taking some time off from live streams to focus on the next set of Cuttle features, but you can watch previous episodes here.

Last week we hosted Federico who showed us his menagerie of mechanical automata and described the story, process, and mechanisms behind this body of work.

The week before, Ryan and I shared some of our back stories and how that led to Cuttle.

We’ll let you know the next time we’ll be live streaming. Stay tuned!

Other Improvements and Fixes 🐞

• In the font picker, we renamed “Stroke” fonts to use the more common term “Single Line” fonts.
• Fixed a bug where uniform scale was ignored when resizing a shape with a unit-ed scale, like 5 mm.