This is a grille for the outside of an HVAC vent in the robotics area at Nova Labs. The gear and bulb are the Nova Labs icon (you can see it in the sign that greets people at the entrance, too). I cut the grille on my fiber laser and then powder coated it. It was the most complicated project I had done on the laser up to that point, and I learned a lot doing it.
If you look very closely, you can see some misalignment in the holes. That was operator error, where I did not correctly recover my position after pausing the job.
The hole and the inside plate (August 2026)
One of the projects from a weekend in August 2026 was moving the big HVAC unit in the robotics area. Due to a miscommunication, it had been plunked down in the middle of a space we need. So I went in and helped knock a big dirty hole in the wall. Here's one of the other coaches on a ladder, drilling the hole that the vent goes through.
The prior hole just had a flexible tube jammed through it, but I figured I could do slightly better, so I designed an inside and an outside plate.
I fabbed up the inside plate on Sunday (plasma cutter FTW), then spot welded it together and powder coated it. It's a square steel plate with a rolled, slotted flange around a big round opening, powder coated white.
The outside was the next job: a laser cut grate with our logo on it, which I would also powder coat later in the week. That's the rest of this page.
Cutting it (August 2026)
The big round field is a honeycomb of small holes so the air can get through, with the gear and bulb left solid. That's a lot of holes to cut. Here's the laser head at work, close up and then from farther back.
The sheet on the bed of the laser with the pattern cut, and the bed afterward, with the little cut-out slugs scattered over the bed.
The pattern burned into the firebricks shows how serious a 1200W laser is: it did that even when out of focus by almost two feet!
And the finished cut, bare metal, before any coating went on.
Powder coating
I powder coated it in two stages. First a zinc primer, which should give it even more corrosion resistance than the topcoat alone.
Then the white topcoat.
And here it is finished, lying on the workbench.
Installed (September 2026)
It's on the outside wall, in an alley that few people go down, which is too bad. I still enjoy seeing it whenever I do.
It looks especially cool when it's backlit at night. I'll have to get a picture of that one of these days.