For this year’s Valentine’s gift, I came up with this idea. Was a big hit with my darling spouse. Now that Valentine’s Day is upon us and she’s got the only one of these in existence, I am releasing it to the community so others could use it next year if they want.
Needed: wood of your choice, some clear acrylic, some red acrylic, and two 5mmx1.5mm rare-earth magnets.
Unfortunately, the clear acrylic split where the top magnet was pressed in. And it didn’t split when I pressed it in. Split overnight, after I went to bed. I was going for a tight fit so I didn’t need to use any glue for the magnets. And engraving does not produce holes that are all that accurate. So I need to redo the clear piece with a slightly larger pocket for the magnets.
Also, I engraved the red heart, took it out of the machine without moving the larger sheet it was cut from (so that could be used as a jig when I put the heart back in to cut it up for the jigsaw puzzle) and painted it before doing the jigsaw cut. But then I didn’t wait long enough for the paint to fully dry before re-lazing it. So the “My Heart” engraving didn’t come out as nice as I’d hoped. Need to revisit that, too - lazing something that’s been painted first.
I didn’t remove the masking from the back of the red acrylic, which was a smart move. There’s no way to get the jigsawed pieces out of the GF without having it fall apart. If I didn’t have the masking to show me which side of the piece was the front, it would have taken me an hour to put the jigsaw back together inside the wooden frame.
Note: the “You” is reversed on purpose. I needed to engrave pockets for the magnets on the back side of this piece and I didn’t want to do two sided engraves, so I reversed the engrave for “You” so that it was also on the back side and the part could be lazed as a single operation.
Also, note the small light green dot in the upper left. That’s a “test” pocket. I set everything to ignore except for that dot, which I positioned on the edge of the material. Then I ran the engrave and checked the fit of the magnet (both diameter and depth), repeating until I got what I wanted. For the wood pockets, I used the Proofgrade Draft engrave setting with 2 passes to get it deep enough. For the clear acrylic pockets, I reduced the Proofgrade Draft power by about 10% and went with 3 passes.