I’m looking for some thin plywood to laser cut some jewelry for Lindsey for our 5th anniversary this weekend (traditional five year gift is wood). Home Depot and the like don’t seem to carry anything below 1/4" and I was hoping for 1/8" or 3/32" to get the proportions right.
I’m hoping to find something between Buttermilk Pike in NKY and the Hive. I don’t really have time to go to Rockler in Tri County.
I only need maybe a one foot square piece, just enough to practice some cuts and cut out some 1.5" x 2" parts.
Thanks guys, I actually forgot to reply sooner. I work right by a hobby shop geared towards RC and models called Hobby Villa. Their site lists tons of options that are exactly what I was looking for. I’m gonna head there in an hour or so.
I cut wooden jewelry every week at least (my etsy store sells it and I wear it).
Solid wood tends to look better for jewelry than plywood because it captures fine detail and the edges turn out beautiful on the laser cutter, where plywood you can see the edges where it is glued together. You also have a wider range of wood types to chose from when using solid wood.
Rockler is the best for finding little pieces in a variety of wood types, but they are expensive. (In the future I personally will be buying large pieces from Paxton and resawing them down to the thickness on my own now, because it is much much less expensive!)
Since you can’t get to Rockler, I recommend Lowes. I have searched at Home Depot and they have absolutely nothing, you’re right. Lowes has about 6 different species of the solid thin wood and sell them in 1/4" thickness. They have a variety of size peices, too, and are relatively cheap. The good thing about solid wood also is that you can plane it down to any other desired thickness. (The laser doesn’t really cut much thicker if you have a hard wood though).
The two woods sold at Lowes that I like to work with are aspen (soft and very pale, almost no grain, gorgeous on the laser cutter) and red oak (coarse grain, amber colour, hard wood). They both cut nicely on the laser, and I have the laser settings if you want.
If you know any guitar makers (luthiers), they often sell off cuts from where they have cut out the main shape—so the pieces are sort of triangles: corners with a concave cut on the hypotenuse.
The point is this: the wood is amazing. It’s some of the best looking, smoothest, most even-grained wood you can find.