A colleague’s tween daughter is going as a plague doctor on halloween and got a fancy costume, but my colleague had a problem that he was hoping I could solve. The costume came with a rosary bead (sort of) necklace with a large wooden engraved cross on it, and being jewish they were kind of hoping she could go as a “jewish plague-doctor”. First problem was how to attach to the string, without having to restring the rosary (can you imagine me stringing beads on a necklace?) and then the far easier part of lasering a wooden jewish star.
As always I dropped into CAD, because freehand drawing is not my thing, and made a jewish star with the proportions on the Israeli flag (figured that was some official proportions rather than 2 triangles flipped on top of each other as kids do) and then made 3 layers of it, the middle layer had a curved groove cut out of it. Figuring after slipping the string into the groove then glue on the back and voila, no trying to drill the fragile edge of Proofgrade Walnut.
First step was to gently saw a groove in the back of the cross, so the cord could slip out, without cutting the cord, and since the cross was all engraved, I took the Rod of Asclepius, which would have been period appropriate for a physician (that is after all who we swear our Hippocratic Oath to) from Wikimedia, and then exported each of the layers of the solid model as DXF which I converted to SVG in Illustrator, and put them in the file, dropping the Rod SVG file on the center of the top layer star (this way she can either wear it that side out or flip it for bare walnut).
Only thing I might have changed was put a tiny filet on the points, they are sharp! The other thing that surprised me was (you can’t see it because I am very good at hiding mistakes! is that the point where the groove is is tilted slightly but the sides are pefectly flush, that is because the masking paper tore the inner veneer off the ply??? Never had that happen in thousands of cuts! But luckily the thick void filling CA glue mostly makes it invisible (and once I put the top on, you can’t tell at all!). To hide the glue line I just smeared some of the char on the side into the curing glue making it blend entirely…
the middle layer groove exposed (note that actually is 2 separate pieces, and no there is no registration tooling, just aligned the edges, it’s costume not surgery)
The front side (kind of wish the grain ran vertically, but looks fine)
Groove assembled from the inside
Originally I was going to do shellac for a finish, but when I looked at the cross it had a satin finish so figured the built in Proofgrade finish was just fine
