Lasercut city map

My mom’s birthday is coming up, and this year I want to give her something special. I actually came up with the idea last year, but this project makes heavy use of my lasercutter, which was being upgraded at the time. I also underestimated the work that would go into it, but now with the lockdown I’ve had plenty of time to work on this long overdue project. I’ve actually been working on it on and off for about 3-4 months, so I’m extremely happy that it is finally ready, with 2 weeks to spare no less! (The article will be posted after the birthday though for obvious reasons ;-))

So why this map? Well she moved last year from our old house to an apartment in the city. She still has some blank walls, and I know she’s still looking for a nice piece of wall art to decorate the place.

On to the build!

First I needed to prepare all the layers (backboard – water bodies – roads – railroads) digitally. This took quite some time; it turns out it is not that easy exporting vector data from Google Maps. After some detours I finally managed to get decent quality vector files for all four layers. I then had to choose a scale that was manageable with regards to the LAYZOR’s work area, while also making sure the thinnest features still were reasonably strong. I ended up with a 5-piece design, which gave me a finished dimension of about 1 meter across.

For the water layer, I bought large adhesive label sheets, and lasercut them in the same 5-part way. More on that further down.

I laid out the lasercut pieces on a 6mm MDF board and then used a small circular jig to mark a border of about 10mm around the perimeter of the map.

With a jig saw I approached the profile shape, then used this super-duper-safe sanding jig to creep up to the line. I still have all my fingers, but I wouldn’t do that again… Anyway, long story short: the backboard was ready.

I painted the background in a light grey color, from a leftover paint can I had. I wanted it to be a light color, but not entirely white so it could pop a bit more against a white wall. After the paint had dried, I applied the ‘waterway’-stickers and spraypainted all the features.

I ended up having to redo this, because the first time around I was a bit too liberal with the spray paint. The paper ended up creasing slightly due to the sudden humidity, and the paint crept under. This left a disappointing finish, so I covered it all up again with a layer of light grey, and then reapplied the blue spray paint in more conservative layers. As you can see: a world of difference!

Next up: painting the 5 ‘road’ pieces black. Getting into every nook & cranny, this took way more time than I anticipated. When I was finally done, I glued the 5 pieces together, filled the small gaps with wood filler, sanded everything flush and repainted the mating pieces. This was a really tedious process, but it had to be done.

Some of the smaller streets were still very brittle, so I was happy I could finally glue this whole piece onto the backing board. And I was happy to see the streets were lining up perfectly with the waterways.