I’ve been doing blind tastings with friends and we were all constantly referring to flavor wheels. Decided to use the forge and bring the flavor wheel to a piece of wood. They work out great and look awesome. I iterated across a few designs before I ended on this design.
Coasters are cork, wood is mahogany. Forge was used for all engraving and for cutting cork.
I learned with the cork (0.04" thick with adhesive backing), using 1000/2 to 1000/15 was good enough to see an image. Anymore and it turns to charcoal. For the mahogany, settings varied from 1000/30 to 1000/75 for the darkest areas. Resolution was set to 450.
I recently switched to scoring instead of engrave for borders which improved print time. Overall it takes about 1.5 hours to print currently. Vector based image I created in illustrator.
We did several of the distilleries in the trail two years ago driving through Kentucky on vacation. The level of commitment to their bourbon history and the art of aging it was huge. Those folks are huge into their heritage.