This week, our assignment was to “make something BIG” using the ShopBot’s 2D CNC capabilities. Fulfilling my childhood dream of being a cartographer, I decided to mill a map of the world as a decoration for my living room.

I started with a piece of 2x4 ft. birch plywood that I bought from Home Depot. I then found a map of the world from Google Images, and imported it into Inkscape.

In Inkscape, I made it into an SVG, then made all of the lines 1/4 inch in width (the width of the end mill I planned to use). I went through and deleted all of the small islands (sorry New Zealand and the Indonesian Islands) that didn’t look like they would survive the milling process, and added a border. I then exported it as a PDF to use in PartWorkd.

Using PartWorks, I imported the image as a PDF, then created the tool paths – one for engraving the map and the other for cutting the map out. I then used the ShopBot software to zero the tool and run the job.

The job took about an hour to run, much longer than I expected. But in the end I got this…

Shopbot-ed Map

I sanded the whole map by hand to try and even out some of the parts that were not milled uniformly and applied wood stain to the ocean regions of the map and wood finish to the countries. The finished product can be seem below.

Finished Map of the World

PS. I know this map isn’t accurate. I’m just going to go with “its artistic” or accidentally indicative of global warming :)