Trust me when I tell you that my wife’s 3 Sphynx cats own WAY more clothes than even I do. She spoils them like crazy. 
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Great project! Great write up too!
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Ok, here’s my attempt at Fancy Plywood 2.0!
For this experiment, I decided to do more wavy strips of veneer, and make the strips more narrow.
To cut the strips, I decided not to stack multiple pieces of the veneer during cutting like I did in 1.0 since the material is SO thin that it tends to move under the laser assist fan while cutting.
Instead, I took a piece of scrap cardboard and sprayed it with Easy-Tack. This is light adhesive that holds things in place enough that they don’t move while cutting, but also does not permanently stick to the material being cut. It’s similar to a slightly stronger “sticky note” adhesive. This is awesome to use while paper-cutting in the Glowforge, so I figured I’d give it a try for this.
The cardboard with Easy-Tack held the veneer nicely for all the cuts. No fire hazard here folks!
Through a bit of testing, I found that 450/Full Power cut through the veneer without cutting through the cardboard. Your results may vary.
For this 2.0 experiment, I also pre-stained the back side of the plywood base to give it a more “finished” look (and because I’m too lazy to stain finished items individually!)
Note: I just had an additional thought. If the cost/availability of multi-colored wood veneer is difficult for folks, you could also just buy a single light-colored veneer, then stain different parts of it different colors, then laser cut strips from that!
Anyway, back to 2.0. I just cut all the waves out of multiple color veneers, as I already had them.
To glue them to the base, I decided to try a different approach than I did in 1.0 above. Instead of gluing each strip to the base individually, I decided to first fully assemble the wavy pieces without glue, using painters tape to keep them together. I took this approach since the waves were (purposely) cut thinner than 1.0 which resulted in them being more fragile. And yes, some broke while cutting and some broke while assembling. No worries. I strongly suspect that more would have broken if I attempted to individually place them on a pre-glued board as I did in version 1.0.
Anyway… I started assembly using a ruler to give me a straight edge, and just started laying, sliding, and taping the wavy strips in place.
Was this a bit tedious? Yup. Did it work? Also yup. 
So on I went!
I also ended up fully taping across the surface of the strips, as everything started to want to bend and twist a bit as I progressed. As a reminder, these strips are NOT glued down yet. They are just taped to each other.
When I was done placing all the strips (well, all the strips that didn’t break at least!) I flipped the whole thing over and sprayed it with Gorilla Glue spray.
I then flipped it AGAIN and placed it down on my base layer of plywood to adhere it.
And just like in version 1.0, I placed weight across it with a second piece of scrap plywood on top, and let it dry.
Here it is fully dried, and with the painter’s tape peeled off.
Now let’s use some Fancy Wood 2.0! And here’s the end result of a couple simple tests (with a clear coat spray applied to make the colors “pop”):
Under “Lessons Learned” I would put: Use a LOT more glue spray next time. On some of the Fancy Wood 2.0 I had veneer coming off the base, even though I thought I glued it sufficiently the first time. Maybe I should have sprayed glue on the veneer and the base. Oh well. 
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i might suggest using something more permanent than the gorilla glue spray. like 3M adhesive sheets.
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Looking so much better 
Straight lines are ok if that is where you can go with a knife or saw, but with a Glowforge it is like 3d printing a flat sheet 
For wood on wood there is not much that beats a good wood glue, even painted on with a brush.
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Thanks @lampert for an interesting and most detailed write-up. I just learned something today.
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I’m kind of obsessed with this. I especially like the wavy one. And I also have some of that veneer…
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Can you laser through standard wood glue or does it cause problems like cheapo plywood?
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Hi Christy. If you try this, let me know how it goes!
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No problems at all.
I know @geek2nurse has made really thin plywood out of veneers, and it inspired me to do it too for this project:
Standard wood glue never presented a problem.
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Ok, here’s a really quick Fancy Wood 3.0 experiment. Note: This version of the experiment requires equipment that many Glowforge folks may not own… but we’re all “Beyond the Manual” here, so I figured I’d try it and post my results for those who may be interested.
Anyway… I was pondering how I could get a fake inlay look without the tediousness of gluing all the strips down to a base. I happen to have a sublimation printer and heat press which provides a way to transfer printed ink on to other materials. I won’t go into any more detail about sublimation, as it can be easily researched on the Internet.
So, I started by finding an image of wood strips in different colors. For this test, I googled “Rainbow wood” and found something I liked.
I then scaled it down and repeated/tiled it in a graphics program so it would fill out a full piece of paper. It’s entirely possible that you could have found an image online that was already the correct size, so this step may be optional for you.
I then printed this fake-wood-strips image onto sublimation paper. Note: This is NOT the same as printing with a normal inkjet or color laser printer. Those will not work using this experiment method (though there are other transfer methods for those types of printers, so feel free to google it.)
I then taped down the sublimation paper to a piece of plywood and used my heat press to transfer the image to the wood
.
Here’s the plywood with the ink permanently on it.
Then I cut out the same Sphynx ornament I used for version 1.0. Here is the result, after a quick spray of clear-coat.
I like the look of the end result, though it doesn’t look as… real, maybe?.. or professional?.. as the ones that used actual veneer. Not that that’s a big shock, since it’s not “real” strips. But man, was it easy to create! 
Maybe someone can give this a try, but can also laser scribe lines with the Glowforge between each fake strip on the printed plywood? That may enhance the illusion, but I was too lazy to figure out how to get something like that lined up properly.
Final note: The colors are muted since they were not transferred on to a white material. I knew this would be the case in advance and could have pre-painted the plywood base with white paint, but I wanted some of the natural wood grain to be allowed to show through.
Ok, I’m off for now. If I ever come up with anything else good, I’ll post to the forum again. 
Have fun all, and keep experimenting!
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Oh this is a nice addition to the idea.
For anyone who wants to try something like this, it’s also possible to do it using a standard laser printer:
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Oooo, I really like this project! And I too have a fairly useless stack of veneer to play with…
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I wonder if bleaching the wood would get you closer without losing the grain pattern…
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actually, i’d consider doing a whitewash instead. you can literally just water down regular paint and do some testing on how much to thin it down.
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They all look wonderful. Thanks the great write-ups and ideas.
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It looks very shabby chic … which I love. I may have to buy a sublimation printer etc… which I have been looking at for some time now!
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I think at that point, you should go with another pattern. I love sublimation, but printed wood looks like printed wood. Speaking of which, did you just sublimate on uncoated ply? It strikes me that I haven’t tested that.
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“but printed wood looks like printed wood”
Agreed. And bummer!
“did you just sublimate on uncoated ply?”
Yes, unfinished non-PG ply. It was cheap stuff (relatively speaking) from Home Depot. Since this was an experiment, I didn’t want to use my “good” plywood.
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Thx for the writeup variations, very cool!
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