For our next assignment with the two different materials I am thinking of making a chessboard with two different kinds of wood. I would cut the wood into strips. Maybe 12" x 12" is good. Then I would glue the pieces together and then cut and glue again to make a checkerboard...also maybe I would order chess pieces for it and not make those! Or make rubber stamps like these...
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12/5:
I would still like to maybe make the chess board later, or chess pieces for a marble board I have which has broken pieces. Instead this week partially due to lack of time/finals I ended up going with the stamp idea. I have always wanted to make a stamp of the Perfect Wave logo. At first I was going to carve it but realized I could engrave an inverted image onto rubber with the laser cutter. I think I could have rastered the raised part maybe one more time but I haven't tried it yet, so maybe it will work? I also cut 4 squares out of the 1/8" Alder wood I used for last week's project to glue together for the handle and rasterized the logo onto one of the pieces for the top of the "handle". This time I also used the 75 W Laser cutter, which did seem more powerful, you just have to manually focus each time.
Next I will glue the wooden pieces and the rubber to the wood.
Update 12/7:
I tried the stamp as it looked above and some of the flat parts around the image were still stamping, maybe because it wasn't cut deeply enough around it the image, so I decided to carve it a little more by hand. I also realized I should have flipped the image, as it is coming out backwards from how it normally is, but it's also OK in this case as I will still use it/sometimes I have flipped the logo around depending on the occasion to play with it...but I may redo it properly with a few more passes and less space around it so I don't waste as much laser cutting on just cutting a rectangle around the shape, and then cut off the excess with scissors. But now it makes a pretty decent stamp.
The final stamp and print it makes
The rubber came from the Dick Blick art supplies store on Bond St. around the corner from NYU -- "soft rubber" for printing, where they are having a holiday sale. I also got carving tools and special adhesive from Amazon so now I will need to make more stamps either with the laser cutter or by hand to use it which will be fun...