Rose Gear

I designed the 16 sided gear, I call it the "Rose Gear".

The gear was divided in 4 parts.   But since it has multiple layers, in all there were 42 pieces, what were all glued together.   The laser-cutter was acting a little "weird" when I cut it, so some of the cuts produced a lot of charring.   I may have to re-cut this gear.

Dice Box

I'm still working my wall of gears, but I decided to take a small break from that and design something else.   I have some friends from work who asked me to play D&D with them.  With that in mind, I decided to create a box to carry my lucky dice, and my character miniature.

I want a box with 2 compartments, one for the dice, and one for the miniature.   I also saw some boxes with "live hinges" that I really liked, so I'm going to experiment with those as well.

Here is the design from SketchUp.

I made a few modifications, and added a magnetic hinge to keep it closed.

Here are pictures of the actual box, cut in MDF.

Here it is a little bit open, so you can see some dice on the left, and a miniature on the right.

You can also see some small rare earth magnets that keep the lid closed.   There are also some in the hinge, so that when it rotates, it magnetically "clicks" closed, and stays that way.

I really like the design, but I wanted to do it in some wood that was a little nicer.   I tried with MDF, with a Birdseye maple veneer glued to the top.   It looks nice, but in the living edge, the pieces are too narrow, and the veneer just broken in some parts.

I'm going to have to find some 1/8 solid wood, and try it out with that.   More to come on that later.

Lightning Gear

I'm continuing to work on my "Wall of Gears"!   I've now designed the 8-sided gear.   I call it the lightning gear.

Like the 20 sided one I previously made, this one was also too big for the laser-cutter.   I split it up into 4 parts (it looks like 8 in the picture, but some of the cuts did not go all the way through the wood).