I finished mine tonight. It was inspired by the Moon Tiles project on the Bantam Tools site. I made mine a lot smaller though so it would be easier to find a spot to hang it.
Using the Far side of the moon topography stl from NASA. I put the stl in Blender and used the decimate function to reduce the mesh. Then I used Vcarve desktop to import the file and select a section that I wanted to use. I used a 46286 1/8 tapered ball nose from Amana with a 3d finishing path. Took around 1.5hrs to cut.
I couldn’t figure a way to cut the design in to 4 squares. So I just cut the wood up before milling it.
Overall I am really pleased with how it came out. I did have issues at first. When the endmill would change directions it left an indent in the piece as seen below. This left an X shaped line in the whole piece. I think it was because my settings for the bit were no good, I was using some Chinese amazon ballnose that I got with my used machine. I ordered a set of Amana ones and used their settings in vcarve and it remedied that issue.
Cut rocket link: https://cutrocket.com/p/6018843646303/
Basically the idea was to take the Japanese flag and put Mt Fuji topography over it. However it seemed too abstract and didn’t come across clearly.
So I decided to go with the Colorado state flag with Colorado topography over the top. Mostly happy with this. Going to send both on to a buddy who will make a box with them as the box top.
Woods were walnut (because I didn’t have time to experiment with dying maple blue), maple, padauk(red), and osage(orange). I’d like to give it another go with using blue dye. Also the cutting out of different parts is quite tedious and I had a few issues with parts not quite lining up. I think there may be some slight size change converting from inch (how I designed) to mm (for cutting). Clearly I should just stick in metric more.
Dimensions for the flag gotten from this site: https://usflags.design/colorado/
Hey, love your map and GREAT stuff on IG. What kind of wood do you use for your maps? What holds the bit edges the best from your experience? Thanks and keep up the awesome work.
