So my son is currently at UND in the aerospace program a a commercial flight major, working on his ATP (Airline Transport Pilot). He asked for some coasters for his apartment that were aviation related.
So I got some bamboo coasters with cork centers off amazon. And then got a cool silhouette set of stock from Adobe Stock in AI format of famous airliners. And then pulled in factoids from Wikipedia (a few typos snuck in - ugh). Anyway I used the settings from another post on cork here. Thanks to @macphee for the settings to start with, and for the bamboo outer ring just the usual maple ply settings as always work great. They look super sharp.I decided a nice mix of modern and vintage was a good idea. Obviously not to scale otherwise the smaller planes like the DC-3 would be tiny compared to a 747 on the coaster.
Where I converted the airport map from the FAA (thank goodness the government is generally pretty good at giving away the stuff taxpayers funded, so all the charts are online - but ugh what a horrible PDF to clean up). Weirdly the “Arial” font in the PDF is somehow NOT the arial on your computer, so AI substitutes it (which was fine as I had to redo all the text to fit the 1/32" end mill as the letters were too small for that). Not sure why all the US airport codes begin with K (AmeriKa?). And helpfully UND posts their logo on their university website in PNG or EPS format.
Fun facts about the Grand Forks airport. Despite having only 2 gates in the terminal and 2 delta flights a day, it is the 26th busiest airport in the US (busier than Orlando and Seattle!) due to the insanity of UND’s flight program. The Minneapolis center (that covers Grand Forks airspace) refers to Grand Forks as “the beehive” as once the school gets going the airspace is packed! What’s crazy is while they have commercial airliners (CRJ200s) coming in you have hundreds of piper Archers and Seminoles from the students along with GlobalHawk air-force jet drones flying out of Minot overhead on their way over the pole to Afghanistan). Luckily Josh learned around Boston Logan’s airspace so is used to very crowded traffic. The problem on this piece is the taxiways as so thin as to need the 1/32" end mill which takes a REALLY TINY bite (well 1/32" to be precise I guess) so this cutting board is a 3.5 hour job! for a 13.5x7.75" carve area)
So the x-carve version ended up failing. Unlike my tormach which has a power drawbar changing end mills on the X-carve involves a wrench for the collet. It is almost impossible to turn the collet without nudging the carriage (as opposed to the Tormach which just opens the collet pneumatically so no lateral force at all). so I ended up with a skew of .073" between the roughing and finish passes (1/16" then 1/32"). Amazingly did not crash and snap the end mill. So just cancelled out as it was going to be pointless. I may change it to be thicker lines or something so no end-mill change… or just mark the xy-xero location when I change it.
So the x-carve version ended up failing. Unlike my tormach which has a power drawbar changing end mills on the X-carve involves a wrench for the collet. It is almost impossible to turn the collet without nudging the carriage (as opposed to the Tormach which just opens the collet pneumatically so no lateral force at all). so I ended up with a skew of .073" between the roughing and finish passes (1/16" then 1/32"). Amazingly did not crash and snap the end mill. So just cancelled out as it was going to be pointless.
@brokendrum is correct: Correction: That was the solid bamboo set I purchased for engraving on the X-carve. These are the cork ones I engraved on the Glowforge…
Love how sharp the plane images are on the coasters! Really nice! Question for you - did you apply any type of sealant? I’m planning on a making a set of coasters as a housewarming gift but I’ve wondered if the soot will smear when the coaster does its job. Thanks for the Amazon link, too!
Cork not on that link.