Board

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3d Printed Board

I started off trying to 3d Print a board, and the tiles. But the board and tiles were small, and the tiles failed. SO, I kept and painted the board. I sanded it first, then painted using acrylic paint markers.

Board 1

Then, I wanted to make a more full size board (after the fact, i found out my board is probably too small, but whatever.)

Fullsize Pai Sho Board.ai

Here is the size. In order for it to fit, we made the tiles just under 1 inch (.9491 inches to be exact.)

To make the big board, I tried making a black and white picture of the board and thought that might be enough. I was wrong, but we used the picture to make lines and re-create the image in Adobe Illustrator. We made the lines a width of 5 to get the thickness.

Here is the process of me painting the board with the same paint markers I used with the smaller board.

Board 2

I made a second board using a different color pattern. I had a lot of paint leftover from painting a Mega Gengar, so I reached out to my cousin Amber for some ideas on color palletes. I prepainted this board. To figure out where everything needed to be, I tried figuring out the center of the board after tracing a circle using the first board. After 20 minutes, I was informed by Avery R that I could do a vector engraving to get the lines all set. OPE. Well, it was unfortunate but fine. My regret with this board is that I tried painting some more orange early to try to finish painting early, but caused raised sections that still show on the final project.

First picture are the settings we used to cut out the 1/4-inch plywood. We did the engraving and cutting twice. It looked like doing the job once was not enough to cut through the plywood, so we were going to do it twice off the bat, but the second time really helped the lines get much crisper. The plywood apparently soaks up paint quite a bit, and the second pass with engraving burned away the excess paint that had been absorbed by the plywood. The absorbed paint (after the engraving) can be seen in the 2nd and 3rd picture. The fourth picture is the finished board.

The Final Two Boards!

These were great! I really love how the boards turned out. I still need to coat them with something, and that needs to be determined. Also, planning on doing another board with the original color pallete and the pre-painting and scoring of the second design.

Board number 3!

Board #3. I didn't recall the vector engrave settings, so I tried something. Ran it 3 times and it looks okay. The original file was 24x18, so I had to resize the file to be a document size of 40x28 so the big laser would be okay with that.

I need to find out if the power or the frequency need to be higher to make one pass work out better.

Engraving worked pretty well, Except for the main horizontal line. I think it went with the grain a little too much, and I struggle seeing it.

Red First

I taped off sections with 3M painter's tape. That is the plan for all the colors. These are different paints than I used for the first board, but I like how they are turning out. I painted on with a brush, but I can't tell that I used a brush with the red.

Gold Second

I can tell I used a brush for the gold, though it isn't super obvious.

White Third

Man, the quality of paint used affects how much I need. Or I just need a lot of the gold compared to everything else.

Ready to cut, probably twice again.

Here is the settings and progress I made for cutting the third board! Like the second board, I did the rastering and vector twice. Rastering twice removed extra paint that absorbed into the plywood, and Vectoring twice helped cut all the way through the 1/4 inch plywood. EXCEPT, I need to do the vector 3 more times to actually get the board cut out. Same settings at the second board, but it didn't cut it out. I slowed down the speed to 5, then it was able to punch it out with minimal splintering.

Here are all Three! I think the third board definitely turned out the best in both painting job and general look.

This is probably my last boards for the 2022-2023 school year. I have a couple of ideas about what else I could do going forward:

Redesigning the Board

The last board was good, but there were some issues with the lines not lining up the way I would like. Plus, I thought it would be good to try and figure out how to do it.

I'm currently working on designing an 18 inch diameter board, which means each square will be 1 square inch. I'm using a circle with diameter 1 inch and diameter 2 inch to help draw in the lines so I don't have a superfluous amount of small 1 inch lines scattered throughout the drawing. The below screen shot is showing how I went from the above picture and used the 2 inch diameter circle to draw in more lines. 

I noticed, as I was almost finished two things.

BOOM! I think I got the board set up. My goal here is to see about un focus the laser to make the lines faster.

To achieve some of my above goals, I wonder if I can break up this drawing into pieces for various efforts?

PS Board V2.ai

White Lotus Board

I thought it would be cool to put a white lotus in the background. This would significantly increase cut time (I think), but maybe not if it is going back and forth anyways. Prepainting, then cutting this would be slick, but the difference in rastering might not make it really playable or smooth. BUT! I figured out how to do it. I can crop a vector image using a rectangle and something called a clipping mask. I set two white lotus tiles to 25% opacity, then enlarged to diameter of 18 inches, and finally using the clipping mask to make the four quadrants.

Here is the website I found that showed me how to do a clipping mask: https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-crop-in-illustrator--cms-35770 

PS Board V3-White Lotus.ai

Cut Apart Board

I thought getting the separate pieces would be rather difficult. BUT, with the learning how to do the clipping mask with the white lotus board, it turned out a lot easier than expected! 

So this could be the basis for doing separate woods, or doing high quality stains. OR, just completing a board in smaller chunks that get wood glued together.

The thing I struggled with the most was figuring out how to make a triangle. Of ALL things. The semi-circle and weird region I used a rotated square to do the clipping mask.

To do the triangle, I used these instructions to do the first option with the pen tool

PS Board V3-Cut Apart.ai

Iroh Board

This was a cool first version of this board. I learned a couple of things making this.

Mini-Board/Coasters

Cause I like small stuff and they are cute

I used one of the fancy designs from above to make this smaller one. I put a black circle with stroke of .001 around it to cut. 

These are the settings I used to cut out the Childcare sign I made earlier, and it was similar material.

The one on the left is the above settings. The one on the right is with 50% raster power. I tried 50% power to see if it was enough to show Iroh's face, and it was not successful. I need to load up a newer version of either photo shop or Illustrator and change the colors. Two noteworthy things about both of these cuts:

Coaster Updates

I re-figured out how to edit and change the color scheme of the image trace I did on Iroh! I tried both Shades of gray and Black and White Logo because I wasn't sure which one would turn out better.

Black and White Logo turned out MUCH Better.

After sharing the design with the Pai Sho community, I got some suggestions that I followed up on. I did a different design for the White Lotus. I alternated the color scheme to correspond with the white and red gardens. I set different opacities of the gardens so they would show up equally.

Here is what it looked like on the computer before I printed it.

This one did not turn out very well for a couple of reasons.

Here is my most recent redesign! Yay! I hope that they turn out well.

HUZZZAH! They turned out really well. I could sand it to make them look a little cleaner, but not a huge priority at the moment.

These are the most recent and up to date MDF lasering settings that Austin has found.

More Coaser Updates!

I had a big think. Most of the coasters are made out of MDF. That isn't very conducive to being a coaster. So why not cut out clear acrylic circles to be glued on top to protect them? Good call Last

Six quick circles with a 4.142 inch diameter.

And six cut out. I left the backing on to hopefully reduce burning and warping on the circles themselves

The First Three with Glue

I used an Elmer's Purple dry invisible Glue stick on these! WOW! I just applied it around the outside of the edge of the board hoping that would be good enough

With the glue-dried

It was! The glue dried really well, even the chunks! Some of the glue is visible if you look too close.

Finally made these two

These are the last two suggestions I got from the Pai Sho community.

And now sanded!

I think I wet paper towel might have helped, or I wasn't careful enough with the sander. These both have since become coasters as well.

Acrylic Board

I want to make an 18in board with a 1 inch space around it out of sheet acrylic. The idea to use an inlay approach sounds facinating, and involves some learning to get it to work. So here we go!

Inlay Prototype

I wanted to make sure my cut lines were good, so I filled the shape with red after using the pen tool to outline where the cuts should go. Then I could adjust to ensure coverage.

I then made the fill transparent, and VOILA!

If you look closely, you can see the cut line. I made the original lines 5 point, and traced cut lines from that. Then returned the design to smaller size.

I started doing some things to figure out the inlay, then I realized I had a colored board already. I changed all the fills to black, the stroke to white, and made the stroke 4 point.

I was worried the clipping mask would prevent cuts, but that wasn't the case! Huzzah! Though, there was a cut circle I didn't remember being there. OPE.

The pieces are VERY close to fitting. I'm moving the cut lines in a little bit to see how that changes things.

I reduce the size of the cut shape by .01 inches in all directions, so I hope that should work better.

Here is the 2nd attempt at getting it correct. I put some extra gates in there for good luck!

Redesign results

As you can see, it is better, but the pieces don't fit great. I don't like that. Mr. Wiemer asked how I was measuring and figuring things out, and I said I was measuring.

But then I realized that I don't think I was, and "eyeballing" doesn't count as measurement.

Lining up the part that I am rastering compared to my cut line, I can see why the pieces were not fitting the way I would like them too. While I hoped the laser would fix my eyeballing error, this is still too much error.

Use the white arrow, I moved the anchor points and adjusted them so that they were right on top of the raster section. That should remove maybe too much, but at least the pieces will fit where I need them to be.

Repeated the process for all three pieces. I'm going to try just these three and see if it works this time around. If they fit, and they should at least fit, then I'll try double rastering the board for the inlay.