Jon Glazer
Grove City, Ohio
I decided to try to use the halftone tool to create a drill pattern. Then I thought I’d try to make the pattern something interesting and then, hey, why not put something in the holes. So this is what I came up with.
There’s not a lot to do as far as steps are concerned. The vast majority of the time was in actually screwing in the screws.
I started with a 12″×12″ piece of .75" poplar. I applied a piece of black laminate to the wood and was ready to begin drilling.
The halftone application (and there are a few) lets you set a number of settings. The most important ones were:
- .01" min width
- .01" max width (you just want point of drill)
- diameter is the diameter of the screw you wanted to use. Mine were stainless steel trim deck screws. The head diameter was about .22" so I made the diameter .25" (all inches here)
what you should see is just a pattern of dots. Export this as a .DXF file and import into V-Carve or Easel and you are ready to go. Use a drill bit or endmill that makes sense. Once I was done, I had to edit and adjust the -Z commands in the gcode to .5". Pretty easy search/replace in the text file.
Then just cut the holes.
When you’re done, you should have a nice pattern of holes in your laminated board. Here’s the fun part: Put on a good movie and start screwing your screws in. I wasn’t too concerned with making them perfectly level with a cordless drill. I went back later and leveled them a little with a hand screwdriver.
The end result is rather heavy and is fun to fidget with. In retrospect I probably should have chosen different screws. These were about $16/box of 100 and it took about 275 of them to fill out the pattern. But the definition of the subject sorta required steel of some kind (man of steel .. :) ).
I just thought this would be an interesting change in projects. Easy to understand and execute.
Steve Moloney