CNC (Lasers, Routers, Etc)

Just finished prepping these 3 for engraving. I'm going to make 3x tables approx 44in x 18in that go right in front of our big windows, in the "map room", so the homeboss can put potted plants on them. All from 1786.


I ordered some of these to try for a different table, too. If they look good, i'll probably use shorter ones for these 3x map tables.


And I'm biting the bullet on a router table this weekend so I'm hoping I can step it up a notch on these. We'll see, since I still think I need a planer to really get where I want to be.

My wife's friend is throwing a birthday for her daughter's sweet 16 today, and apparently she's a huge 2pac fan, so she wanted to make her 2pac earrings. So I just set this up and she's going to whip up a set of earrings real quick before heading over this afternoon.

Saving this for later. Epic coasters.

Whats a good neutral, meme picture that works with a solid black & white engrave? I want to do a bamboo cutting board with epoxy inlay

k^M said:

Favorite cutting board I ever did was just a B&W picture of wolverine, seemed fitting for a cutting board. Didn't know they made food safe epoxy to put on, that'd certainly make sealing them easier.

For meme's, I don't know why but a B&W version of this guy on a cutting board seems like it'd make me laugh the most. Given how many food products resemble a dick

View attachment 368422

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This made me laugh


I'm afraid it needs to be more of a cutout/ucon/ transparent background thing. I'll see if I can come up with something for this though

Well I finally finished these up. I'm happy with the learning process as I went through it and they're halfway decent, but not terrible happy with the final product. I just made too many blunders with the coatings. Fucked up the first 2 layers of poly and it was all downhill from there.

Since I don't think they're good enough to sell, we're just going to put them in front of the (dirty) windows and fill them up with plants over the winter.




And here's the next one that I started.

k^M said:

Any way you can get tiles that aren't rounded over at the edges so you can line them up perfectly? That's the only jarring thing to me, with spacers/groute leaving blanks in an otherwise cool image.

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I have a few tiles I've been trying to find the right settings for that aren't beveled. From what I can tell, you're going to use grout no matter what though. I think people still use 1/16" grout lines on those types of tiles. I've been using 1/8", and they go up to 1/4". This is the first time i've ever done any tile though, so open to input from anyone that's done it a lot.

I honestly don't mind the seam lines though. To me, it feels more like a table with an image on it versus something that isn't a table being made into a table. Not sure if that makes sense.

I have to redo the first 16 tiles though because I fucked up the image alignment on them. I prepped that file in about 20 minutes at the end of the work day and was so focused on centering one of the pyramids that I didn't realize I was barely off the image on the bottom left. I was bummed out when I saw that last night. I think I'm going to try to fix it by painting a solid black band around the outside. I almost threw all of them in the garbage because I'm tired of working my way out of a hole, but figured I'd see what I can do with them.

Work in progress, but I wanted to post this so I could post a few lessons learned.

1. 1.5mm line width is just about as small as I should go for resin inlay.
2. For the first time ever, I can finally sand resin without gunking up my sander in 5 seconds. It's because I baked it at 170 degrees for about 10 minutes, then turned off the heat and left it in the oven for 4 hours. No problem sanding it now.
3. Don't listen to my wife on the color mix/Micah powder.
4. I should have filled in the knot with wood filler before lasering.

This is for one of our teaming partners in a big project (who worked for my company before going and starting his own). He loves the Drone mapping i do on their projects and always chats me up when I come out for the quarterly flights. I started talking to him about the topo maps and tables I've been making on my laser and he asked if I'd want to make something for a rural property he owns. I told him I still have a big table (pyramids of egypt) that I need to finish up when the weather gets warmer, but I've been wanting to try resin inlayed contours for awhile and would try it on his property. I was going to do a cutting board, but his property is a perfect square and I couldn't think of anything I had where a square would make sense. Also, I'm not artistic enough or good enough at graphics to figure out something that would work with a rectangular cutting board. Had some ideas like placing text on the side with a legal description and lat/lon stuff, but I didn't want to spend too much time on the file.

First resin coat was warmed up and mixed in the house, then poured in the cold garage. It turned peanut butter thickness as soon as I spread it on the cold wood. 2nd coat was all done inside and spread out much more evenly. I still have pockets from air bubbles in there, but I'm wondering how many of them were caused by me rolling the resin with a foam roller after it had been in the oven for 10 minutes. By that point, it had gotten pretty thick and I'm thinking I may have actually pulled some out of the inlay lines. Going to try a 3rd coat today.

Minwax aged oak on, going for high gloss poly after this dries. The dark blue really jumps out under the light, so I'm thinking high gloss is the way to go.

edit inc

whoo said:

Heres an idea if you come up short on converting from layers to gcode:.



If the site he uses doesn't have your topography, you can use the same process by making a greyscale image of your layers.

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Thanks @whoo

There was some good tips in there and this is sure as hell easier than the way I was going to do it. The site the guy showed in his video has the option to upload a kml for extents, too.
*mesh files from this site are huge, around 55mb. waiting for it to load still, but I'm guessing it's a higher sample spacing than the one below. I'll edit in a picture when it loads.
edit - here's a screenshot of this bigass mesh




Here's another I found - Terrain2STL

Principal engineer at work told me last week to register an LLC and he'll give me a check for 5k, no strings attached.
Then he pulled me in his office this morning and said "seriously. 5k. 50k. More is possible."
His wife builds and sells businesses and they really want a side project. We'll see if this goes anywhere.

Working on learning Fusion360, bit by bit.

This is just a mesh of Mt Tabor, merged with what would be the edge of a 24in coffee table. Void would be filled with clear resin.
Still trying to figure out how to stamp text and stuff into the surface mesh.