Cynical use of popsical sticks in the spirit of those 'lick-a-prize' competitions ice-cream manufacturers used to sometimes run in my youth:
I endeded up with some offcuts of polycarbonate in my scrap box, which looks rather like acrylic ... until you try to laser it! Then it burns rather than etches. But if you don't mind brown-on-transparent, it is not a bad result (though it burns very messily and the laser unit needs rather a lot of scrubbing out afterwards!)
Since my colour choices were brown, or brown-from-the-other-side (a slightly more orange-brown), it was either poops or something coffee-themed. I stand by my decision!
I originally was just making 21mm tokens out of offcuts, for no real reason other than because I could. Then someone mentioned that their daughter could make ear-rings out of them, so I ran off a few with the poops slighly below-centre and a hole at the top. Then someone else saw them and wanted buttons, so I poked some holes in the eyes for sewing them on to things.
I worked with a student to make some wooden 'coins' for an art project. Some Tarrot themed ones for a game with faces like love/hate peace/conflict life/death and so forth. She was in the Graphic Design stream, so they were really nice!
The trick is to tape the wood they are being cut from to the laser-cutter bed so you can flip them over in-place (with the offcut wood acting as a jig to keep it all aligned) so the etching of the reverse side stays well-lined-up.
I also used the technique to quickly run off a few of my own (notably less great) ones as demonstrations. I spray-painted one silver and left the other wood with just a protective coating of clear varnish.
...
Prior to Australia releasing its new coinage for King Charles, I made my own.
My first ever actually useful 3D-print!
An adapter to allow me to put two old vacuum-cleaner hoses into one of the filtered exhaust vents in the workshop ceiling. These are to extract fumes from the 3D printers, so don't need a full 100mm pipe each, unlike the laser cutter.
Broken data cables....
In my line of work, I get to use a lot of cable adapters and signal converters. Far too many.
Humanity! Pick a standard already! For more than 3 months, even!
I came across an image-edit mock-up of something like this online many years ago, and with some dead HDMI (and later other) cables, plus some 80¢ hose connectors, and a bit of glue, have started making a facetious statement on the proliferation of 'standards' and the associated cable adapters. I have made several of these over the past few years as gifts for technical colleagues.
Glenn's home page.