With the script finally finished we sent the first set of nets to our in-house laser-cutter to make a prototype from 4mm plywood. Our cutter can take 600mmx300mm sheets. Using Corel to read nets from AutoCAD has resulted in one piece being scaled by an arbitrary and random amount - this means we are unable to test the prototype until we get the piece re-cut on Monday. We could however test aspects of the design such as the text alignment and joint tolerances. We had tried aligning straight edges with the edges of the plywood sheet in order to reduce the amount of cutting (and therefore production time) but we discovered that the sheet must be clamped into position. This is likely to be necessary at full scale also.
