I’m doing a Fusion360 Tutorial and hoping to get it posted tomorrow. This has turned out to be pretty cool using a VCarve.
@Julien …. I’m also a physics nerd 
Waiting for the sealer to set, then some paint.
There was some small chipout on some of the edges, which isn’t surprising using hard maple, I was expecting a lot more on the surface edges. All in all, pretty pleased with the V Carve.
Very cool!
I love how the wood grain warps under the ball in the third picture
It’s good to see that the vcarve method looks almost as good as the initial alternating woods version, because I assume that removes a good hour of work too.
Next challenge (to myself): do a version with electromagnets hidden in the base, and paint a hollow metal ball black, for a “levitating black hole” effect !
What did you use to set the math?
The operators seem small and they aren’t in-line with the variables, and the super and sub-scripts don’t seem very consistent in size/placement.
(Yes, I spent a not inconsiderable part of my previous professional career either setting books or journal articles or designing fonts)
Care to share the tutorial? Is it on YouTube?
Don’t forget some LED strip lighting for the accretion disk!
@Merick01 posts great videos on his YouTube channel. This is that video: https://youtu.be/YpffFDzFyLQ?si=cOeyJbyvLy3yD82x
I don’t think it’s a type setting or font design issue… it’s gravity! The letters are getting pulled into the well.
@WillAdams yeah, I didn’t have any Fonts that matched up with mathematical equations, so I used Illustrator and used font variants of what I had loaded, then ended up making an SVG of the text to use in the CAD/CAM in Fusion.
I tried to replicate as close as I could, but was limited on my attention space and hate for Adobe Illustrator 
Here is the image of the text I generated and mapped to the surface.
I believe it was a combination of Lucida Bright and Symbol fonts.
Hi! Here is the link the How-To video:
If you use Fusion360 and want to follow along with the video, I have the file on my Patreon for free. The link is here: Erickson Design and Woodworking | Woodworking Tips and Tricks | Patreon
You want to use an equation editor — that will nicely handle alignment and so forth.
Note that to typeset an equation in Lucida Bright you could use the Math fonts — one source for them is:
https://tug.org/store/lucida/index.html
with which one could use TeX/LaTeX.
I could also see this being modified with a Round surrounding (maybe quarter rounds bonded together) with a lip filler the same level as the original square and a short “wall” all around to keep the ball inside the project. Then one could do like the do in Vegas and spin the ball around the lip and watch that gravity curvature take over!
If anyone ever wants to re-visit this, here is the (La)TeX code for typesetting that:
\documentclass{minimal}
\begin{document}
\begin{equation}
G_{\mu \mathrm{v}} + \Lambda \mathrm{g}_{\mu \mathrm{v}} = {8 \pi G \over c^4} T_{\mu \mathrm{v}}
\end{equation}
\end{document}
(assuming I understood everything — if some correction/adjustment is needed, let me know)
which when typeset using Computer Modern looks like:
(changing the typeface is left as an exercise for the reader)
Very cool! Working it right now to update the SVG.
I’m here to tell you that you’ll save a heckofalot more than an hour if you vcarve a solid block of wood instead of investing the time it takes to build a blank that is essentially a cross-hatched end grain cutting board. I just finished this project using the latter, and while (mostly) fun and skill-building, it was a very time-consuming challenge. As @Merick01 discusses in his video, you have to plan a way to keep all the laminations from sliding around during glue-up. And after you slice it and re-glue in the cross direction, it’s very challenging to get the perpendicular lines to line up. If I had it to do over, I think I’d do it as a vcarve. Nobody really sees the bottom anyways.
Yeah…the glue-ups are an exercise of working some woodworking skills. Sometimes I’ll use a saltshaker in-between the glue joints, but with longer glue ups, the salt usually dissolves before its time to start clamping and it’s a slip n slide.
Making the vcarve version, it was soooo much easier lol where I found myself kind of shocked on the free time I had to enjoy the cuts. And it’s easy to create the reverse side to vcarve the bottom.
