Are you ever amazed at how amazing you are and what you can make? so amazed that you need to make a blog post (arguably very vain blog post) about it?

I am.

For Christmas 2019 presents I wanted to do something different. Having recently gotten more familiar with the laser cutter, I also wanted to see what I could do on that.

First off, cutting boards:

I took some Walnut, cut it into strips and glued thinner maple strips in between:

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Once the strips were glued together, they were rotated 90 degrees such that the end grain was facing up and more maple was glued in. A few trips through your friendly surface planer results in a flat finish while the honorable router creates smooth edges. Some sanding to make the product smooth before some mineral oil to bring out to colors!

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The Sign:

I wanted to make something different as well, so i thought doing a layered sign for my brother’s company would be really cool. I knew roughly what i wanted it to look like but more importantly knew the themes; hard-working Swedes building houses for families.

I took a bunch of carpenter images from the internet and imported/merged them in Illustrator to make a few different layers. Unfortunately, I don’t have a ton of pictures bit here are some. i had covered all the wood in blue painter’s tape so the burn marks from the laser cutter didn’t mark up the wood.