My holiday gift for my daughter who loves all things with mice, is a cutting board with tessellated mice inlays. I found a tessellated pattern online that was close to what I wanted to create, however it was too intricate to be used to cut wood inlays. I redrew the basic outline, smoothing the contours enough to ensure it could be cut with a 1/32" end mill. I then used V-Carve to trace my hand drawing, tweaking the resulting vector until the shapes would fit together with minimal gaps.
The inlays are cut from maple, white oak, and panga panga. The boards itself is cherry. After cutting a million mice inlays, I glued them together using blue masking tape to secure them while the glue dried. The sheet of mice was then placed back on the CNC with double side tape, surfaced flat and then cut to the desired outer shape. It was finished with butcher block mineral oil.
Just WOW @JoeT !!! I’m just blown away by this. So cool. Would love to see this with the mice done a little thicker and no frame. It always seems a shame to inlay so that you can’t tell if it’s marquetry or full thickness. Would be really cool to be able to use either side. Would also be cool to have the corner mice breaking out of the pattern ala MC Escher. Now look what you’ve started!
Thanks so much Charles! I had originally planned on making the mice thicker and stand-alone (i.e. not an inlay), but I discovered I would had to have scaled them up more than I wanted to accommodate a larger diameter end mill with a greater cutting depth. At their current size, I wasn’t able to get anything larger than a 1/32" end mill into all the recesses. And those tiny end mills have a max cut depth around 0.200".
In case you want to ponder this more, a unique variation is the non-repeating geometry. A few simple tile of the same shape can create a pattern the never repeats. I can across them years ago as a result of work by the mathematician Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose. Penrose tiling - Wikipedia
My patio is paved with a nonrepeating tiling (pavers) that annoyed the stone setters initially. Available from Lowes. They appear to be aperiodic tilings.
A similar set up would make a great cutting board. Thanks to JoelT for the example.
