This was the first time we were tasked with creating something completely artistically free. Although we were given a lot of freedom, we were required to have some things. To further our understanding and application of different machines, we were required to use at least two of the machines that we had previously been taught how to use. as well we where required to pick and use two different materials from a list. I chose to use Epoxy and Wood. 

For the modeling, I started in Adobe Illustrator but quickly realized that it would be much easier to model in Fusion 360.  started by doing some calculations on how big I would want my board to be and how far apart all the tiles needed to be. After settling on a 21x21 board size, I went to the wood shop and milled and glued two pieces of wood together, a little bigger than 21 by 21.  After taking exact measurements of the piece of wood, I milled it, put it into Fusion 360, and made sure that my board would fit. After all of this, I made two separate tool paths, the first to cut out the size of the board and the other to cut out all of the necessary pockets. 

After cutting out the board and all of the pockets, we noticed a little bowing in the wood. We thought that if we clamped the board down while pouring the epoxy, it would fix the bowing. Pouring the epoxy was a very tedious task because I had to hand-mix every single color in small batches, and staying consistent was very time-consuming and hard. We alternated colors pouring all of the light and then all of the dark. We mixed silver in with the light and gold in with the dark to give it a pop of color. 

Unfortunately, after all the epoxy was poured, the board was still warped, so we decided that we had enough tolerance that we could try and mill the bottom flat using the CNC and a routing bit.  We were able to flatten out the bottom so that it sat flat when we milled the top. In order to make sure none of the colors mixed together, we decided not to fill them to the top and mill it all down flat together. We used the same bit as we used to flatten the bottom to flatten the top down to be perfectly flat. We achieved this by running the same program over and over but setting the z0 a little lower each time. 

After a good amount of sanding, we were ready for the second machine of the project, the laser cutter. We actually ran into an unexpected problem when laser cutting the board was too big to cut all 4 sides at once. There was an easy fix. Luckily, we cut 3 out of the 4 sides, then rotated it and cut the 4th side. We used the deep engrave feature to get a nice legible character. With a little more sanding to get rid of some laser marks, we were almost ready to stain. The bit we used to make the top of the board flat, unfortunately, left some little nicks in the epoxy. To fix this, we used an air compressor, and some thin ca glue to fill the little nicks in the board. After some more sanding to make it smooth again, we were ready to stain. We stained the whole board and put two coats on the top surface. Then finished by putting some little feet on the bottom.