An Ouija board is not complete without an eye planchette, so I needed to make one.
As a design I found this really cool image on Google:
I really like the style of it, but it is a very rough image so it needed a lot of cleanup. I considered manually tracing it, but I really didn’t want to put hours of work into this, so I got it as clean as possible and let Illustrator work its magic.
As a test, I generated the toolpaths in Rhino (my main CAD/CAM software) and carved an MDF prototype. It was mostly satisfactory, but upon closer inspection the recessed flats weren’t cut properly. I know the functionality exists within RhinoCAM, but I didn’t manage to get it to do what I wanted, so I cut my losses and reverted back to vCarve, which is much more intuïtive in that regard. But the prototype did what it was supposed to do: point out the flaws in the design.
I made a small tweak around the eye graphic and reworked the toolpaths in vCarve. Carving was again without issues. I didn’t bother to document it because it’s all pretty basic stuff tbh.
Next up was filling the design with wood putty. I used different shades to add some depth. Wood putty yields great results and sands off easily.
On the backside, I made a pocket cut as to minimize friction, and added a recess for a piece of round acrylic. It’s a press-fit which is awesome. Then I decided to round off the ridge, but the piece slipped and my roundover bit ripped the wood apart. Damn!
Luckily, I could easily shave off a few millimeters and retry. This time with better luck.
And that concludes this project. I really like the results, but I doubt it’ll ever see some use.
