Noah B Woodworks

At the end of yesterdays blog post I was exploring ideas for a gift I could make for my dad for Christmas and his birthday. He is a difficult person to get gifts for; a person who needs for nothing. He loves tools though so I figured regifting my not-so-great desktop CNC might be fun for him, but then I got to thinking… It would be really cool to make a topographic map that shows the landscape of where our cabin is located in northern Minnesota. He’s been doing a lot of forestry and ecologic preservation work up there and I figured it might be useful to have a 3d map of the landscape.

I got to looking and found a website https://touchterrain.geol.iastate.edu/main that generates .stl files. STL files (standard tessellation language) are meshes that fusion 360 and other CAD softwares can read including slicers for 3D printers. It was surprisingly easy to gather an STL of the terrain. You can adjust the Z scaling so the landscape becomes more and more mountainous, almost comically so.

After a little tweaking I had a mesh and imported it into Fusion. I figured I would go over the top and add labels to some of the landscape that show where each cabin is. I labeled all of our closest friends and family cabins by creating a rectangle and extruding it up through the landscape. I 3D printed a test, and I’d like to do a carve out of wood on the CNC this weekend.

The 3D printing was tricky, because I had to size it up to get it to print the letters correctly. The slicing software showed me a preview and my initial model had font that was not going to work at all with printing. Also, I found it was better to use multicolored filament because it printed a gradient that was easier to see the change in elevation. I’m thinking I’d like to eventually make a really big one out of wood with little houses/cabins instead of the text letters representing where all of the cabins are. It would be good to do every cabin instead of just the friends of the Budds. I believe there are like 25 or so cabins. It would be a huge task but a good way to positively impact our small community.

After the holiday season ends, I’ll be looking to finish the looming speaker project for my brother and looking to get back into puzzle box making. I’m doing my best not to lose sight of that. I was thinking it would be fun to make a puzzle box for the people up at our cabin as well, with clues that relate to the geography of the landscape and reiterate some of the history of the association.