I thought I’d share a S03 job that I’ve just completed. This is a crokinole board. The Tree of Life image is .025 inches deep cut into standard birch plywood. The image was purchased from Shutterstock, downloaded into Inkscape and turned into an svg. The svg was then brought into Fusion 360 where I used a 3/16 inch engraving tool from Freud and the 2D trace operation. 19000 rpm on the DeWalt router, 70 ipm. To do this project, I had to raise the gantry 5/8 of an inch so I could fit the 26-inch diameter playing surface under the rails. I stained the playing surface with General cinnamon dye stain and routed the main white scoring lines with a standard router. The surface was then afixed to the S03 and the job was run. Interestingly, because this particular board was Home Depot brand 1/2 inch plywood, the surface was not very even. After the first complete pass there were areas where no lines were cut into the wood. I went back into Fusion 360 and selected just those lines and ran it as another pass. It ended up taking about five passes to get everything cut. The ability to have it return to 0,0 automatically was a godsend and made this possible. Finally, about 10 coats of polycrilic was applied to the surface to level out all of the traced grooves.
This was a trial and unfortunately I won’t be able to sell this board. It has two huge flaws. First, at about 8 o’clock there’s a dark circular spot near the black disc. This was caused by a void in the plywood. When the dye stain was applied, the top veneer (because of the void beneath it) rippled like corrugated cardboard. I put in a plug from the backside, but it was still a problem, and it wouldn’t go absolutely flat there. The second problem is that the tree image is not centered properly in the second scoring circle. It touches at the bottom but not at the top. This is the result of careless centering of the workpiece by the operator.
All in all, the S03 did a really fine job here. It was everything I had hoped it would be and allows me to offer a whole new set of possibilities for crokinole board art. It also makes me very interested in pursuing fills like the solder fill that was in the forum recently. For me, the Inkscape to Fusion to Carbide was the Tinkers to Evers to Chance of this project.
