J-Term: Advanced 2D and 3D Design

Asa Forman

Mr. Grisbee

J-Term: Advanced 2D and 3D Design

23 January 2018

32 million different chip variations lie within the game of Backgammon.

Today, contrary to yesterday’s unproductive schedule, I completed the majority of my second project, my backgammon board. My backgammon board is comprised of numerous parts. These parts include: the points, made from pieces of 24” x 5” x ⅛” purple heart and wenge, the space between those points, made from a piece of 48” x 5” x ⅛” cherry, the board’s base, made from a piece of 12” x 30” x ¼” Baltic birch plywood, the board walls, made from a piece of 24” x 5” x ¼” wenge, and the pieces, made from 6” x 12” x ⅛” pieces of both walnut and soft maple. As one might infer from the description of the wood I used to compose board, the board is quite colorful. The dark wenge contrasts nicely with the light, reddish tinge of the cherry and both work to bring out the striking purple color of the purpleheart wood. Below are several photographs of what the board looked like at 3:25 PM today. While making the board, I encountered several problems.

            The first problem I encountered while making the board was attempting to cut the board points from the purpleheart wood. When printing from the laser cutter, one must select a thickness, and of course I selected 1/8th, or .125, and one must also select the material in which one is cutting. Unfortunately, on the printing program we, the students of the Post Oak High School, use doesn’t include every single type of wood in their printing repertoire. Thus, I selected general hardwoods and began the cut. Upon inspection, after the cut, I realized that the laser had not completely cut the pieces out, and fragments of the wood between the cutouts were still connected, preventing me to pop the points out and place them in their correlating places on the board. There is a simple remedy to this, however, as I merely replaced the piece and ran the laser through the same cut again, thus enabling me to achieve a cleaner cut and not have to force the points out of their respective places on the piece of wood they were being cut from. The second problem was determining how to make the 45 degree cuts required to create the edges of the board seen in the photo. Fortunately, however,

I did not have to worry about this problem as Mr. Grisbee both stepped in to show me how to do the cuts, as well as did the cuts as there was no room for error, and I did not feel comfortable performing the cuts myself.

All in all, I felt like this was a successful J-Term and I am quite pleased with my final products.