128 Segment Wooden Globe

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I made this as a wedding gift for my brother, it took a long time as there were 16 double sided strips to machine and it was a nightmare to glue together. It didn’t turn out as well as I hoped due to seams/alignment issues but overall I’m reasonably happy with it. I think I have a much better way to do it if I ever try to make another one.

It is ~14" in diameter and made of Spanish Cedar.
The back of each strip was milled with a 1/4" ball end mill and the front a 2mm ball end mill.
I wrote some software to generate the g-code and in theory you could use this method to make a sphere of any size.

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Here is one strip after milling the back side:

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Here are all the pieces ready to be glued together:

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There should be a “what can’t a shapeoko do” for this sort of things. Amazing project!

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That is amazing! Interested in sharing your program for generating the sphere? What did you use for the front?

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Unfortunately the software is a bit of a mess as I just wrote it quickly for this project, there are a bunch of hard-coded parameters specific to the stock I was using. I am planning on cleaning it up and including it as one of the templates in a CAM tool I am in the process writing.
As stated, the front was milled with a 2mm ball end mil.

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I meant, what was the process for putting the map on the segments? Did you write software for that too, or did you use a program off the shelf?

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Sorry, I didn’t realize your question was about the generation. The software I wrote creates both the back and front sides. The front is based on a heightmap, for this project I used the NASA ones from here: https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=73934

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That’s really cool Shannon! You should consider entering it in the Community Challenge #17

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