This was an experiment with slot and tab construction to replace one of the die cut cardboard pieces (the wind gauge) for a miniatures game, Sails of Glory.
The faux engraved glass effect with the Proofgrade Green Glass Acrylic is really stunning, and of course fits beautifully with the Age of Sail.
The image of Zephyrus, the Greek god of the West Wind was generated using ChatGPT 4o with the prompts:
create a simple line drawing of zephyrus the greek wind god blowing forth the wind
make the head look more like a classical greek image
I did some light editing in Adobe Illustrator after using the trace-to-black-and-white-logo tool.
I highly recommend the website Cuttle XYZ. I used their Tab and Slot Tester to pick a tight kerf by playing with the tester made out of the target acrylic. I then downloaded the tester SVG and broke it apart to get the slot and tab parts for the kerf size that worked best. I used Illustrator’s Direct Selection mode to cut and delete anchors, no pun intended.
I’m expecting and hoping that eventually someone will make a template for Cuttle XYZ (or elsewhere) that accepts a vector design and allows you to mate (har!) a specified edge of one shape to the interior of another and then automatically adds the tabs and slots with the correctly dimensioned kerf sizes. Until then, it’s a careful manual process.