Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Search for “marquetry” images and you’ll be blown away at the art form of combining small pieces of wood to make amazing pictures. I’ve been intrigued by this, but I’m a nerd so I did it on a laser cutter. I thought it would be way easier and it probably was…. but it was still a challenge.

A while back, David Picciuto from Make Something sent me a box of small wood scraps. There were a lot of very interesting species in there, but they were so tiny it was hard to think of something to do with them. (Kinda makes sense why he would give it away, huh?) Then I hit upon the marquetry idea.

A butterfly seemed like a good first attempt so I found an image online that was close to what I had in my head and then tweaked it and made it into a laser cutter file. I spent many hours tweaking my design with test cuts at the laser cutter to get it as intricate as possible without making pieces so small that the kerf of the laser would totally obliterate the tiny piece.

In the end, I combined coconut palm, walnut, maple, purple heart and a couple other woods that I don’t know the names of to make the butterfly you see below. It’s pretty fragile, especially the antennae, but it at least held together long enough to take a photo. The dark outer wood is the coconut palm. In addition to the top border that you see, I also cut a solid bottom piece that everything glues on to.

This one is a Christmas gift for Mom. Merry Christmas!

Router-carved signs are a common sight at fairs or even in pop up shops at the mall. I’ve been watching a bunch of Dave Rhoten’s videos on YouTube and finally I decided it was time to try it for myself. I purchased a Dewalt DWP611 along with two special router bits and a nice base plate from Dave’s store.

I bought 1×8 select pine from Home Depot (mostly knot free) and put on a couple coats of shellac. Then I used the laser cutter at work to draw the letters that I wanted to cut. That made the layout portion of the project very easy!

The next step was the most time consuming. I used a very narrow V-bit to carefully cut around the outside of every letter. Then I put in a bigger 90 degree V-bit to draw the big cloud around the outside and cut out everything between the cloud edge and the edge of the letters.

After a little cleanup with some chisels to remove any remaining high spots, I covered the whole piece in black spray paint. When it was dry, I sanded the top which removed the paint from the letters and the part outside the cloud leaving the indented part black. The shellac coating helped to keep the paint from bleeding too deep into the wood on the parts where I didn’t want it to stick.

Finally I used my keyhole bit to cut a slot in the back for a screw or nail so it could be easily hung on the wall.

This was a gift for Don’s brother and his wife in Montana as a thank you for letting us stay with them. And since I was making one, I decided to make two and give one to Don as well. It’s a fun and relatively quick project, but it takes patience!

My parents have been building a fantastic new garage at their house. I thought it would look good with a new sign in it. I found some inspiration online, drew it in Inkscape and then took it to the laser cutter at work. The sign is made out of two sheets of 1/4″ MDF. The bottom is just a circle and the top has all the shapes cut out of it. I also cut the white portions out of 1/8″ plywood and put that under each of the white pieces. That gave it a raised look which I really like. After I got it all done, I realized I probably should have put “Martens Garage” instead of just my Dad’s name because Mom uses it for her project too but, oh well. Maybe I’ll have to come up with something else that has Mom’s name on it.

I’ve had a lot of projects go really well lately, but there’s one that has continued to haunt me and I’m officially tossing the idea. I give up.

Tyla found some motorized Thomas the Tank Engine trains for Elijah. They aren’t the size of the standard wood tracks, but they do make plastic tracks. I thought it would be fun to make my own tracks because then we could have whatever pieces we wanted and it could exactly fit on his play table.

The first few attempts involved etching the wood repeatedly to burn in the tracks. I tried multiple times and finally got the interlocking knobs to fit properly, the curves to be big enough that the train could make the turn, and the rails to be the right width. The problem was that they were never deep enough to hold the train in place. When you’re etching wood, you can only take so much off at a time before it starts the wood on fire, so these attemps amounted to hours and hours in front of the laser cutter watching it slowly take away material. Here’s one of my best attempts with that method. It was rare for a train to make an entire circuit around the track without falling off and I eventually tossed these in the trash.

I gave up for a couple months and then had the idea that maybe I was approaching the problem backward. Instead of trying a reductive process of burning away material, why not do an additive process? I cut one piece that formed the bottom of the track segment and then the top segment was made of three pieces: the middle and then the two outer edges. The “rails” were left blank on that top piece. So the whole segment was two thicknesses high but the rails were only one thickness high. These were very quick to cut and it didn’t take too long to glue everything together. I thought for sure this would work but… the bottom of the train drags on the middle piece and the wheels can’t get to the bottom of the groove to push the train along. Fail. In the trash it goes.

If I spent enough time I could probably figure out the right way to do this, but this project has ceased to be fun and if I decide that I really want Elijah to have tracks, I’ll spend the $26 on Amazon so he can have tracks that actually work.

It wasn’t a complete bust because I learned a lot about the laser cutter and fine tuning designs, but it stinks that I don’t have anything physically complete to show for all that time.