I always wanted to make one of those laser cut lake depth topographical cutout thingies. I finally got a chance to do one with a little lake in Michigan that my family has been around for some 70 years. I traced the depth contours and then cut out the different depth layers separately in proof grade maple. Then I did the same thing in acrylic and was able to put the acrylic pieces into the maple pieces to make a nice set of coasters. Merry Xmas mom.
Results are below.
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Very Very Nice!!!
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That is awesome! Very well done!
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Great presentation!!!
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Oh that is brilliant. Unfortunately for me, the lake where my parents have a cabin is an uninteresting bowl and isn’t terribly deep. Not weedy, not many other cabins, very picturesque, clear water and yellow sand, aka a perfect lake, but boring from a bathymetric perspective.
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Oh gosh, that is so cool! Wonderful design!
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Great idea.
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Fantastic job, Roger! How did you secure the acrylic to the ply?
I really love that view from straight up.
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Awesome! The combination of two of my favorite things! Only thing I could think to improve it is if the acrylic had a slight blue tint to it that would appear to deepen with each layer. Also might be cool to lightly score the upper profile lines on the lower layers of the wood to make them look more interesting individually.
Great project, I’m sure Mom will love it!
BTW, I grew up in Big Rapids, a bit north of there. I did some fishing at Croton and Hardy Dams from time to time.
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Awesome idea! The acrylic inlays are smart. Love the depth readings, too!
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This is just charming, so thoughtful.
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I used a few strategic drops of superglue… Unfortunately the project has more than a couple glue laden fingerprints on it because I’m not so adept at this yet.
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Well, you photographed them well enough, I could definitely tell. I’m sure your mom will LOVE them! How did you get the depth chart of the lake? Was it publicly available?
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Yes, I found the soundings on line and then used an iPad with an Apple Pencil to trace the contours into Affinity Designer. That was a painstaking, but really effective process. It gave me a vector-based image where I could combine the different depths into separate layers. It worked well.
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Really cool idea!
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Simply Spectacular! Well Done in deed!
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Man, you put a lot of work into that. It shows!
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Wow, that is super cool! Great job!
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Amazing!!
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I found it best to leave the masking on everything as long as possible until assembly is done. I had some over-spill of glue on the protective paper of the acrylic on my project and wiped it off and there weren’t any marks.
The problem is, it is so tempting to tear that stuff off as soon as it comes out of the machine so you can see how beautiful it is. 
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