More Making Your Own Collectibles : Why I Love Ponoko

It was many a month ago that I read about a little company called Ponoko in Wired, or Make, or some other magazine that makes me look hip. Based in New Zealand, they used lasers to cut things up. As if the words ‘New Zealand’ weren’t enough to enchant the pants off of me, ‘lasers’ were just the icing on the proverbial cake. At this point, my pants were a distant memory at best.

Ponoko wasn’t cutting up just anything – they were cutting your designs into materials of your choice. As long as it was flat and you could plot it out using a vector graphics program, you could have it made. The possibilities kinda took over my whole brain, so when a Ponoko hub opened up in California, and I knew that I had to make something. Anything. I needed more lasers in my life.

No, this wasn’t like my obsession with the LEGO Creator program, where I made a giant $100 Iron Monger out of a pre-set collection of plastic pieces. I was going to make my very own pieces into my very own item. Making one laser-perfect item of my own devising was super exciting, but the idea that I could potentially make hundreds of identical items was even more amazing. All of these custom art toys, all of these shapes I’ve been seeing in my head, and all of these crazy items I’ve had in my head since high school were now makeable.

I immediately set to work sketching, measuring, analyzing materials and concocting plans to make a science fiction astronaut character out of flat pieces of 6.0mm thick wood. While the NZ hub has a huge array of materials readily available to fabricators, from fabrics to acrylic panels and fancy hardwoods, the US hub is still coming up to speed with their material complement. In the meantime, Ponoko has compensated for this difference by offering shipping prices from NZ comparable to shipping from CA. I wanted my stuff quick and easy, so I stuck to the US.

Because I didn’t expect my initial attempts at designing to fit together flawlessly, I plotted out two different prototypes – similar in shape and purpose but using completely different structures, one a little tricker than the other. After encountering a lot of difficulty with uploading the very specific files (which turned out to be a glitch on my end), and with some quick and personal help from Ponoko staff via e-mail and on their forums, I managed to get my prototypes uploaded into the system, which does a great job of altering you if something about your file is incomplete or incorrect.

Despite the US hub being hammered with orders, my designs were organized, cut and were in the mail to me in less than 24 hours. Potential designers should note that the pricing to make your stuff is determined by a lot of factors. You’re charged for your materials and the amount of time it takes for the laser to cut out your designs. The more lines you have, and the more complex the shape, the more it’ll cost you. This is where a bulk of the cost seems to come in. Shipping is also a little expensive, due to the special size requirements of most shipments exceeding typical packaging. If you buy a Ponoko membership, which is $39 a month, your costs will be significantly cheaper. I managed to save $17 in my first order alone. By order #2, the membership cost will almost completely cancel itself out.

The next week was spent in a state of nearly wetting myself with excitement, waiting for the Ponoko cut pieces to arrive. I spent the time making other components that would be used in the final product, and playing a whole lot of Evony, because the nearly-naked elf chick that Google Ads was showing me insisted upon it.

The pieces arrived on a Monday, right before work. It smelled like a delicious fireplace. All of the cut pieces rested safely in the cradle of the wood that they were cut out of, backed on both sides with a protective film to hold them in place, waiting for me to pop ‘em out. Despite some of these pieces being incredibly tiny, and as narrow as 1mm thick, everything was so perfectly cut that I was able to use every piece that popped out of the puzzle. And because of my precision measuring, and the ever-so-slight material loss because of the laser cut, all of my notches and grooves slid together with a perfection so excellent that it was almost poetic.

Since the prototypes worked with such ease, it’s now time to go back into the files and perfect them so that they’re optimized for cost and quantity, slipping in all of my needed pieces into the allotted spaces, leaving no empty, wasted space. There is where I can begin mass production – an army of original characters to take over the art world, or at least a few display shelves.

Official production pieces, pieces that are entirely handmade, and pieces that are handmade out of manufactured materials all have varied collectability and audiences, and all depend on the materials used, as well as the popularity of the artist. While my dreams of grandeur are mighty, we’ll see how my little spaceman fares. Perhaps it’s the first step towards a collectible empire. So, my thanks go out to Ponoko for finally making this collection of ideas finally real, and hopefully, the readers will swing on by and make some awesome stuff that I can collect too. It’s an awesome experience to see these things come to life. You can also visit the existing store of products and buy your own awesomely design-centric stuff.

Here’s a sneak peek of my Spaceman. Shhhh.