We’ve all seen our fair share of crooked gingerbread houses, daubed with frosting to the point where they look less like a building and more like a bomb site. Johan von Konow has a solution to that problem though: design the building using CAD and manufacture it using laser cutters.
Johan explains on his blog that he wanted to create an accurate, miniature 3D representation of his summer house — out of gingerbread. So he threw the plans into a Computer Aided Design system, and then cut the panels to make the house from slabs of gingerbreads using a 50-watt laser engraver. The result’s really quite impressive. It wasn’t all fun and games though. As von Johan points out:
The biggest problem with the cutting was the smell. Lasers tend to create a lot of smoke, and this one was worse than usual. It was something between burned cake and burned hair… After tasting a piece of the left over we become aware that this house is never going to be eaten!
That’s a shame. Still, if you fancy giving it a try yourself, Johan’s description of the process is well worth a read. [Johan von Konow via Engadget]