I only got my Shapeoko in March, so I was excited to see this contest since it is the first time I have something that I have done that fits. My entry is fairly simple in its use of magnets, but the design took me a long time since it was also my first real project on the Shapeoko. I designed a cribbage board like a lot that are out there. It felt like every time I moved to the next step, I found out the Carbide Create would not quite do what I needed so I ended up combining Carbide Create and Inkscape.
The first step was designing the ovals needed for the actual outside shape of the board. This Was not easily possible in Carbide Create, or at least is seemed like it was not. I went to Inkscape and created the outer oval and then imported the SVG into Carbide Create. This I discovered was too soon. I wanted to have the peg holes follow the oval and did not want to create them and manually place them. Back to Inkscape. I copied and scaled the oval to smaller tracks for the peg holes to follow and then created a circle that would fit the pegs and used the scatter tool to force it to replicate along the path This took a lot of trial and error to get the spacing right.
Once I got the holes in a spaced the way I wanted them I went through and removed every 6th circle to provide some spacing for groups of 5 and then removed some extras near the end and left a single hole for the winner.
After this I was finally able to move back to Carbide create and import the SVG file. I was able to remove the path ovals that were used for the peg holes and create an offset one from the outer oval to use as a reference for the topper that would come later. Within the topper oval I fit a cutout to store the pegs and cards and magnets.
Once the base cribbage board was done, I was able to make a copy of the Carbide Create file and use it as a topper file. I removed everything except the inner oval, the card pocket, and the magnet holes. This is the file I use for the underside of the topper. I then copied this file and removed everything except the outer oval. This is now my template for the top of the topper. I modify copies of this file for anyone who wants a custom board.
My favorite topper is probably the one that made use of GIMP and the new trace image feature in Carbide Create. I was able to take a picture of someone’s cottage and then use Gimp to sharpen the main features of the cabin and then import it into Carbide Create.
I used Red Oak for the base and Cherry for the topper. Sorry about the weird part under the cabin. I wanted to remove the family name that was carved in underneath.
Here is an example of one I carved for my family with the magnets visible to show how they are used.
I have since removed those indents in my files since the magnets are not strong enough that I needed slots for my finger to pry the topper off. It looks a lot cleaner as you can see from the image above with the cottage.