Texas Coasters

My wife kept eye-balling some Texas shaped coasters at the store. I told her I would make her some. I finally had a weekend to work on it.

This is some left-over poplar I had laying around. I split the 1 by material in half and ran it through the planer until it was about .3" thick.

I used Adobe Illustrator to scale the design and used Estl Cam to produce the G-code. The outlines were cut on my MPCNC with a 1/8" end mill at .3" DOC and 10 IPM. While setting up the cut I finally found what was causing the last of my flex in my Z axis. I discovered that the tool mounting plate on the Z tubes was loose at the top. This was allowing the tool to pull/push at the top. I tightened that back down and the rest of my chatter went away.

The little heart was burned using my cheap Chinese 50x65cm “5.5watt” laser. My wife originally wanted me to try to burn a little star/heart at each of the places we lived. My concern with doing that is some of the places are real close together when the entire state is only 5.5"x5.5". This would have made the hearts look like little dots. I decided to go with one heart over Dallas (where we basically call home). I used Inkscape with the Jtech extension to create the gcode for the laser. I then uploaded it to CNCJS to run the burn.

Once the workflow was setup, each coaster takes ~5 minutes to cut then burn.

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We have a bunch of Colorado shaped coasters. They sell them everywhere.

I tried to talk the wife into flat-earth shaped ones so that we could be hip again.

I live in Richardson/Garland area about a mile from where the tornado was ripping off roofs a couple weeks ago. Made me very grateful.

Oh and nice work.

Sorry, but I thought these would be Texas sized, as in "everything is bigger in Texas! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yeah, but it would have taken a lot more wood to cut them full scale… :slight_smile:

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Then they could make some Alaska shaped serving platters to the same scale of the coasters! ???

They’re 5.5" high by 5.5" wide. Big enough for a large sized Yeti cup to fit on them. They’re not exactly small.

We live in the Josephine area. I used to work in a building that is just a few blocks of where the tornado ran through Richardson. My friend’s dad lives 2 streets away from where the tornado lifted off. If it had stayed on the ground just a few more minutes he would have been hit. Glad to hear ya’ll made it out ok.

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Bah! Go Hollow Earth! :slight_smile:

A hollow Earth would be a donut. Kinda defeats the purpose of a coaster (to catch sweat)

You could just engrave the hollow center… With little bas-relief dinosaurs and giant insects and such like.

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Pretty cool to see a mixed use project, I don’t think they happen as often as most think they would. In this case it is perfect as any carving would collect nasty stuff, etching is perfect.

I think part of the problem with mixed-use is having the space for all the machines. There’s really no good setup out there that can do both CNC and laser on the same machine. Neither of my machines are really big, so it’s not so bad for me to have both of them. The Laser machine lives on top of the CNC enclosure. Since I made the CNC enclosure floor level, the laser is about workbench height.

If I ever build a low rider, the plan will be to build it so that the laser can be mounted under it. At that point, I really want to upgrade to a CO2 laser. I have a lot of other projects in the way of starting that endeavor.

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I can’t imagine doing any projects without my laser to do engraving and cutting. It makes things go so fast in assembly. I do a lot of 3D printing and laser combo projects. Working on doing something with the MPCNC and the laser. Watched a good video on using a vbit to cut bevel sides to a box for good fid together. That is one drawback of a laser. With the MPCNC doing the bevels on the edges I can do some good laser engraving and cutout fast on the sides.

 

The hardest part with using multiple machines is getting the 0 point for x,y perfect.

In the case of the coaster, my 0 point for the heart was dead center on the heart. I just turned on the laser and moved the coaster under the beam until it pointed where I wanted the heart. The nice thing about the laser is it won’t push the piece around, so you can just slide it around and not worry about having to secure it.

I finally finished the coasters. I tried out LightBurn again. It took a few tries to get the speeds and power right for it to work. What I liked about LightBurn is that I could scan in one of the coasters and then use the image to line up the zero point. I used the point on the heart as the zero point and then added my text under it. LightBurn warned me about the text being out of bounds, but I ignored up. I turned the laser on with the laser in the middle of the machine. Then I turned on the test power in cncjs to line up the laser to the point on the heart. The three different cities are where we’ve lived since being married. (Btw. I like the new forum interface)

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