Ambigrams and Checker Boards

[buibui]

Tonight, I experimented with a couple new things, the bitmap trace feature in Vectric and the prismatic v-carving feature. Not bad for the first try, although I should have spent more time cleaning up the vectors because the lines didn't come out perfect from tracing. I just got too excited to cut.

The artwork is made by my friend, who creates ambigrams as a hobby. An ambigram is lettering that can be read forwards and backwards, like in the book Angels and Demons. This one is of his last name. Pretty neat stuff!

V-carving the letters sure was dusty. I used a 3/4" 90 deg v-cutter, and a 1/4" single flute bit for the profile. Material is 1" mdf.

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[hennie]

Nice john!

[buibui]

Thank you, Hennie! :)

[domino11]

Beautiful. :)

[Castone]

Looks great!

[ljunior]

:eek:That's amazing.

[buibui]

This weekend, I worked on a two-person chinese checker set that I had designed and wanted to make for some time. I love the look of old wood-laminated surfboards, and like to incorporate the look into a lot of my projects. This game set is made with glued up strips of hard maple, bloodwood, and ebony. I have not decided on the finish yet, probably some Danish oil or the like.

This was the first time cutting hardwood on my MM...much more enjoyable than MDF. Less dust, more chips. It was also the first time I had to care about indexing the material properly due to the stripe down the center. This was nerve racking after all the time spent gluing up the board. I'll need to work on some sort of fixture for this type of work.

Here are some pics of the project, along with some MDF prototypes I made before deciding on the final shape:

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Final game board without finish...
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[J.R. Hatcher]

They are great looking. A cross hair laser would make alignment very simple?? Where did you get the pins?

[buibui]

Thank you, J.R. A laser would probably help...I haven't read enough about this yet to figure out where to get one, how to hook it up, and use it. For this project, I had used a pointy stick chucked in the router :o

Regarding the pegs, I bought them from craftparts.com. Mine are the 5/8" dia. size.

John

[dragonfinder1]

John

I find the center of my project and use a very sharp pencil, make a small line. The use a laser pointed v-bit, center it on the pencil line, then go to the MDI page of Mach and move half the width of my project, then zero the DRO. It's fast and you can get very close to the center of your project.

Given the width of the lines I've seen with lasers, you can get as close with my method. For sure not as fast, but you never have to worry about the lasers being knocked out of align.

Dave

[dragonfinder1]

Castone

How do you set up when you want the file that your cutting to be in the center of a pattern in your material that might not be or is not centered in the base material?

[Castone]

If you start as I was talking about before by finding your 0Y 0X . You can measure the board you are cutting, then you can just jog to what is the center of the board by looking at your computer. Or you can go MDI Type G0 X10 Y5 F20 and hit enter and it will jog to that location for you. Most parts do not require it to be this close but when it does this will always work.