How I used my GF for Valentine's Day

I’d have published this yesterday, except then I wouldn’t have been able to tell my wife she had the one and only one in existence…

Materials: 1 sheet of medium maple ply (which leaves a lot of scrap, unfortunately), about 4" of the end of a sheet of clear acrylic, and about a 3" square of red acrylic. And glue.

There are 4 unique parts, A+B from the maple ply, C from clear acrylic, D from red acrylic. It needs 3x A, 2x B, 2x C, 1x D (D is two hearts).

The outside dimensions of A and B are identical. C fits inside of B, and is captured by an A on either side. The two D hearts go between the two clear pieces and move around freely. The parts stack as seen in this image and are simply aligned and glued together. The V of the heart is 90º so a simple alignment fixture can easily be made with some scrap wood or a couple of bricks even.

And here’s a partially exploded CAD shaded drawing of all the parts.

And here are the SVGs (which you ought to be able to save via a right click on the image), but without the text so you can add your own if you want…

Wood parts A (3x) and B (2x) cut red first.
Wood%20Heart
Red Acrylic parts D (2x)
Red%20Heart
Clear Acrylic parts C (2x)
Clear%20Heart

36 Likes

Very nice.

I’d likely split the inner ones in half so I could flip them to nest them together and save some material - although having a bunch of extra heart outline insides is probably something I could find another use for too. But for the inner layers making each layer out of 2 pieces wouldn’t show that they weren’t cut from a single piece.

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Thanks for sharing. I can see a lot of fun uses for this pattern. :slight_smile:

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Well, given that this went from concept to reality in about 2 hours, there wasn’t a lot of time for optimization. To be honest, I was thrilled I hadn’t screwed up and all the parts actually went together as planned. If I were to tweak it, I would add through holes on the inner 3 pieces so I could align them all on dowel pins. Then I could glue the center pieces together as a unit and only have to worry about aligning the top and bottom piece when gluing for final assembly (because of course, I did not glue them one at a time. I wet the stack down and glued 'em all at once. With Cyanoacrylate. So I was in a rush/panic to make sure everything was lined up before the glue could set. Because I wanted to get this done before I went to bed. Because I admit it, I hadn’t gotten a card :sweat_smile:).

Did come out pretty nice, though. Thanks. The fact that the smaller hearts rattle around inside the bigger heart was a big hit. Sometimes it’s the simplest designs…

8 Likes

That’s really nice! I’ll have to remember this one for next years valentine.

I made a quick and easy one:

Google Photos
Red 3mm felt and a piece of 3mm birch ply engraved. It says “Love is building a future together” as we are building a house.

edit translation

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Nice work :sunglasses:

Spoken like the normal procrastinating male. I did her card on Valentine’s day… :roll_eyes:

"There is no one on Earth I would rather have snoring loud as f#*% beside me"

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Lovely! So very nice of you to share your work!

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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.

Puzzle Heart

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.

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Looks great and very generous of you to share your design! Thank you.

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The wife thinks my love is very puzzling.

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Thank you for sharing this design! And for the detailed instructions. Looking forward to making this, maybe for my husband for our anniversary.

You can of course change the text to suit your needs! Please have fun with it. Though please, not for commercial purposes. Personal only.

:slight_smile:

2 Likes

Thanks for the share! I use the same methodology for magnets with my Shaper Origin. I’m always impressed at how accurate it can be for such a big handheld tool.

Oh and your heart looks great!