Pre-Release: @Ian's Tray Puzzle 1 (Take 1)

So no new designs today, as I spent almost the entire day in our simulation center (starting at the awful hour of 7am) teaching Advanced Cardiac Life Support to 50 of our nurses and 3 of our physicians. This guy unfortunately didn’t make it because he A) choked on a plastic bag, B) someone shoved a metal rod into his ear and finally C) someone tied his oxygen line into a double granny knot…

When I got home I started cranking out a few copies of the cat steps so I could sand/glue while doing other things, since I need to get these finished (both finished and done :grin:) and installed. Then took a break to print out @Ian’s Tray Puzzle 1. Now I didn’t have the AI file, so took the SVG off the page and brought it into AI to take a look (should have taken a closer look probably :expressionless:), but anyhoo took a copy of the outside line to be the cut line for the base, and turned the text red so it could be engraved, rotated both groups 90 degrees to actually fit on a board (diagonals??) and be faster.

I took a piece of 1/8" birch ply from amazon to try it out; this one had a slight warp, although what appears to be a warp is also a quickly cut side which is not square in the waste part (sorry, but it’s a test cut).

Well it turns out @ian you take after me (and now that I’ve made that mistake which was corrected by @jules on my puzzles), I can pass on the learning. As you will see you have several lines that are duplicated (and in 2 cases triplicated!!!). This meant the kerf was fairly off on those parts. It still looked pretty good though! I used the Maple Ply settings (100/27 for cut and medium engrave) as those work well for this ply.

The full monty (video) followed by pictures…


You can see the double and triple burns as the kerf gets black and wider

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I knew that puzzle was going to look great! Would be cool to paint the pieces different colors.

Oh, and I like your selfie–kinda unique!

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I think I’ll do it in the different Proofgrade hardwoods. I’ve been looking for a good puzzle like your cat puzzle and this fits the bill nicely. Still need that fourth color!

I posted my design with the deleted duplicates and triplicates.

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I’ve got 1/8 orange padauk and purple heart which would be pretty awesome!

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How about doing it as a cookie cutter ?

That is beautiful, thank you! :smiley:

As i replied to @Jules i only remembered about the extra lines last night. All the doubles are because the pieces are drawn separately. I’ll take a look at the aw and try and figure out why the frame cut twice. I didn’t see any triples, so will take a look.

On puzzles like this, if i only use single lines then individual pieaces cannot be lifted from the design to be cut from several materials.

How would i get around this without making two seperate aw’s?

Cut the same a/w from three different woods, or coloured acrylic, then mix. :smiley:
John

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That’s a good way to do it. No good if you want to use up small scraps though.
Maybe best to produce two versions of each in the future.

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If the pieces for each wood were different colors, then I could have done that. I could have ignored certain colors.

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This is one where design intent makes a difference. It’s like @m_raynsford’s Escher fish. He has the file set for single cuts for one sheet of material, which is really cool. I turned it into individual fish I can multiply to use any scrap.

One way of using one design for both is instead of deleting the extra cut lines, make them a different color. It would take some planning to do, but it is possible. Two files might just be easier for me since I would most like mess which material gets which colors. But it is possible. Just don’t want to even think of it. I’ve been playing with my parametric shelf so that when I make it smaller or bigger, it still resizes ok. That’s been fun. I have it able to work for a three inch shelf with 1/2" tabs and 1/8" material and it still resizes ok.

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Sounds like you needed and RT. :grin: except for that metal rod in the ear, I wouldn’t have been any help with that.

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Thanks for sharing the full video. Its great to see how the Forge works without having it high speed.

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Thank you – the video was great to watch – see it working in real time.

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I’d like to claim some altruistic thing, but really I just blue-taped my iPhone to a block of wood (which I forgot to remove from the frame later in the video) and pressed record, since that’s all I could do at that point…

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