Lasercut Topographic Coasters (2019)
Software: Fusion360, MeshMixer
Techniques: STL Manipulation, Casting, Cast Part Post-Processing
In winter of 2019 I went on a trip to Death Valley with some friends, saw some stars, and did a lot of reflection on what I was doing with my life. It’s a place of highs and lows, and watching the mountains wash out into endless sand really stuck with me. So I coped the only way I know how, which is to start doing elaborate projects.
I did a really detailed writeup for this project on Instructables, if you want the full gory details, but the short version is:
Prepare, with dread, to reproduce maps of Death Valley using splines.
Rejoice upon finding someone has already released 3D Terrain to STL files.
Do some loose STL manipulating in MeshMixer to campsite area into a cylinder-ish, and exaggerate the topography a bit.
Convert STL into flat files.
Lasercut.
Assemble.
Cast.
Sand.
Sand some more.
Polish.
Repeat for a set of 4.
Lessons Learned
Autodesk has since removed the cool plugin that enabled so much of this project, which is frankly the most tragic part of this writeup. This is a project that is extremely time-consuming and I immediately mailed it away to a friend.