Mucking around with various workflows and decided to try make a 2D ball maze.
Used an online maze generator (https://www.mazegenerator.net/) that can generate either the walls or the paths of a maze. Generated the path, saved as .svg, opened in Lightburn, scaled the maze and then used the ‘Offset’ tool to generate a 7mm wide pocket to suit a 6mm spherical neodymium magnet I had laying around.
I have a bunch of 9mm MDF scrap laying around that’s 400mm x 1200mm. Tried to cut it into the MDF in 4mm passes at 15mm/s with a 1/8" single flute carbide upcut bit but the walls tore away on the 2nd pass. Ended up doing it at 30mm/s, 1mm DOC and max router speed. That’s on an MPCNC Primo with a Makita RT0702C.
Only finishing was a quick sand to remove the fuzzy fibres on the top and to remove the tabs.
Next step will be to laser cut an acrylic top for it and then it’ll probably live on my desk as a coaster for a while. Might try it again with a thicker piece and cut a different maze into the other side with the start/finish lined up and drilled through so that it’s a continuous loop of maze.
Oh that is fun! That sounds like it might be an ideal project to learn 2 sided milling. Might have to that myself. Shoot, if I keep going to all these shows I might make a giant one as a demo product!
Yeah, it could well do. It very quickly showed me the limitations of the MDF that I hadn’t run into before in terms of wall thicknesses, so I suspect it’d be a good way to evaluate some aspects of how a material handles, too.
Doing the 1mm passes gave me plenty of opportunity to vary the router speed and see how it was affecting the dust thrown off.
Edit: Unfortunately, I didn’t find a good alternative to Lightburn for going from the exported .svg to a dxf with offset lines for ESTLCam to generate a pocket from, but if someone wants to give it a quick try and doesn’t have Lightburn, I’m happy to load the .svg up and generate the offset lines for you, if you have a specific maze type/size that looks good.
I was also thinking that adding little pits at the start/finish could be good, but I was struggling with ESTLCAM a bit. Is there a way to get it to do a ‘pocket within a pocket’, say if you have an area that’s being pocketed to 10mm and want another internal section to be 12mm, for instance?
