Laser Cut Christmas Tree

Recently I moved to a small appartment. There simply isn't enough room to place a fully featured pine-fresh christmas tree! Buying a small plastic one can be quite expensive, so I just headed over to the local fab lab and cut one with a laser cutter!

These drawings are inspired by this hackaday article. The original version needed a metal rod, but I adjusted it so you don't need extra pieces or glue! Also I scaled it to fit the size of my wood.

What I've used for the small tree (+/- 13cm) is one sheet of 3mm MDF of 60x30 cm.

For the bigger tree (+/- 40 cm) I used three sheets of 9mm MDF of 60x30 cm.

The drawings included are for the bigger tree. If you want to build the smaller one you can downsize it by factor three.

Take the drawings from the previous step and head over to your laser cutter. If you don't have one, like me, there are fab labs all over the world where you can use one! You can locate one nearby here. Instructions on how to cut are available on location, but a basic tutorial is available here.

At my local fab lab they have Trotec Speedy 300, but any laser cutter capable of burning through 3mm of wood should work. The board size here was 60x30 cm, but the drawings can be adjusted with free SVG editor like Inkscape to move the layout around.

Assembling the tree is quite easy. Start with the round base and add the two panels with the central piece. Then add the biggest leaves piece and add three bings rings. Add the slightly smaller leaves piece, three rings and repeat until four leaves pieces are stacked. Then add one big ring and two small ones. Add the remaining pieces like before.

At the top I added a smaller ring to make a nice finish. The star then fits inside the slot at the top. A drop of glue can help it to stay in place if needed.

And voila. you are done!