Laser Cut Aarnio Puppy for Best in Show Event

I finished assembling this on my kitchen table at about 3:30am today. This is for Mod Livin's second Best In Show event, a charity auction of decorated Eero Aarnio puppies. I couldn't think of any suitably interesting way to decorate mine, so I modeled it in SolidWorks, cut the model into 1/4" slices and sent the resulting profiles to be laser cut from Baltic birch and acrylic.

You can vote for your favorite puppy in the next few days at modlivin.com, and if you're in Denver, the auction event is March 28th. More pics after the jump.

I've always liked burnt ply edges (they smell good too- like a campfire), but I thought the edge finish on the acrylic was kind of interesting. The laser flame polishes the cut edge, but there's also a lot of faceting, probably a result of the CNC control breaking my splines into polylines and not smoothing between them. I wasn't sure what I thought about that, but now I think I like it. All the layers are located to one another with little steel dowels, then glued as well. I had originally planned to add some internal lighting, but the things I tried didn't look as good as just leaving him empty.

He came out a little short because it turns out 1/4" acrylic isn't actually 1/4" (and neither is the birch for that matter). It's actually about .220", which isn't a huge difference... until you stack up 54 layers, then that .030" turns into 1.62".