Hi All! New to the community forums, a few IG accounts pointed me to this contest. I’ve made a decent amount of maps in the past 6 months and it is slowly becoming “my thing”. Here is a map of Lake Cordry in Indiana that I did as a retirement gift. It is 34"x26" with a custom walnut frame.
TIPS
I usually seal the top surface with poly before carving. After carving it is super easy to stain all the exposed carved areas. A small amount of stain will still soak into the top, but that can be a good thing depending on the look. You can also sand after sanding if you want a more “clean wood” look.
For large maps, split your carve into sections. It will keep you router from going all the way across the map from cut to cut. Resetting Z zero for each section will help if the wood is not completely flat.
This was the first map I ever made. I have quite a few videos on my IG @timberfortress if you want to see some of the process and/or other maps. Both tips above were really important for this super detailed map of Middle Earth: Middle Earth Map
Cut out of Iraq, this was a replacement plaque for one of my troops who deployed to Iraq, I used all Whiteside bits, .25 EM DC for cut out, .125 EM DC for the shelf slot and the 7.62 round hole, and 60 Degree .25 VBIT for the lettering. The round and barbed wire are all from Iraq. Posted on CutRocket.
So conveniently, I just made a map as Christmas gift for my sister and her fiance. Map of Manasquan, NJ and surrounding area based on a canvas map they saw in a store once. Crappy phone photos (er, phone photographers) required a decent amount of cleanup in Gimp and vectorization in Inkscape. I would have loved to go with gold dry brushing for the carve and a grey/blue stain or even some epoxy to play with the depth of the carves, but the thought didn’t occur until after it was too late to attempt. Tung oil looks pretty on bamboo at least…
11x7.5" bamboo board from Ikea (per someone on here’s suggestion a while back) cut beautifully with minimal fuzzing/chipping. I think I actually had the CC defaults for hardwood V-carve doubled in CM for feedrate. The resin in the board holds all those fibers pretty well I guess and the hardness is on par with maple so no surprises… Really my only complaint was that my stock wasn’t the original 16x12 I had intended (I originally was going for my standard columbia forest maple ply, but then saw the bamboo sitting all dejected / neglected.
I have a terrible habit of not signing the things I make for people as gifts even though they ask for it so I have been making it a point to add a name somewhere, date, and some silly “maker’s mark” things. So you get a surname and year + some unnecessary Philadelphia references like a Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin riff. Shame the scaling lost some clarity, but I’m happy enough. C2d file is zipped up since it’s 0.8-ish Mb over the limit… Manasquan2_final.c2d.zip (1.5 MB).
The other thing to note: CC claimed 10 hours for this at 10.5 x 7, but it took less than 2 in practice (and I believe 60ipm feed…).
EDIT: Just had a thing I figured I’d throw out to the crowd: what is your favorite finish for carving? oiled/stained, epoxy filled, paint, inlay, other?
Hoping that one of the monsters of design here will come up with something like a globe that is cut in pieces and can be assembled. Something along these lines: 4-sided Globe
The community helped me make my topographic Skyrim map, and I learned a lot from that process. I wanted to make for another game-map that would look similar, but using a different technique. The same company that made Skyrim also makes a game called Fallout.
Unlike Skyrim, the Fallout games use real locations and Fallout 4 was based in Boston. To make this map I decided to do everything by hand. It was a VERY manual process as it took me roughly a week to build this design in Carbide Create, but I loaded an image from the game into Carbide Create using the “Set Background” feature. Then used the “Create Polyline” tool to draw EVERYTHING (except for the logo in the lower right corner). I really enjoyed this process, I would just listen to music and trace lines until it was time to go to bed.
My Skyrim map turned out to be 21 in by 21 in, but the land mass was only 21 in by 16 so I was able to do that without any tiling (I have an XL 16 x 32 limit).
For the Fallout map I would need to learn how to do tiling, which is why you see the holes along the left side of the map. The holes lined up with my threaded inserts, but to cut the (vertically aligned) holes I had to rotate the board and cut them horizontally. This was a good test to make sure my Shapeoko is setup perfectly square and X distances match Y distances.
I then surfaced the top (tile 1 - cnc job 1), repositioned the material and surfaced the bottom (tile 2 - cnc job 2), and then stained the entire board. I could faintly make out the area that was effectively double surfaced, but was satisfied with the results.
I then ran a pocketing pass on all of the water, but had to break that into a top and bottom tile (so that was cnc jobs 3 and 4). And the tiling worked great.
Then back onto the CNC to run some no-offset toolpaths on all of the roads, and some very shallow pockets for the dots, and my smallest 17 degree v bit was used to barely scratch the stained surface for the text. These were CNC jobs 5 and 6, the only trouble was deciding what to include on the north/top tile and south/bottom tile within the overlap. And keeping straight what details were on land vs water since the water was 0.1 inches lower than the land.
I was asking the wood to hold detail it could not really handle, the uppercase letters are 2mm tall and up close you could see the flaws. The Shapeoko did it’s job perfectly, all the flaws were due to the wood and/or stain, but I was more than pleased with the result.
The Carbide Create file for this project is 41.4mb, and this forum has a file size limit, and so does Cut Rocket. I tried exporting everything as an SVG, but that file was over 15mb. The link below connects to a file shared via dropbox, I’ll cleanup/delete the file in a couple weeks.