Shout out to @EricP and @tomthm for the laser cutter advice a couple weeks back, thank you so much, it helped immensely!
This is my 5th anniversary present for my wife (traditional gift is something made if wood…). It’s a topo map of the place we got married, Shoshone Point on the southern rim of the grand canyon. It’s somewhere around 1:4000 scale I think. Was a bit of a pain to draw out each of those contours in Gimp, and a bigger pain to glue it together, but worth it in the end!
Beautiful job On a great gift. Congrats on 5 years. Good thing I didn’t post more advice. I would have suggested going with a toaster or blender for a present. Ha! BTW, somewhere out there is a program that takes maps and generates contour levels.
Ha, a contour drawing program would have been really helpful! I tried to find ways to draw them using some of the capabilities in Gimp, but I couldn’t get anything to work, and figured I’d just bite the bullet and start drawing. In the end it wasn’t too difficult, I used the path tool, which is pretty damn useful, and spent a few evenings on it with some TV in the background. Will definitely look into that program if I ever do something like this again though.
I am absolutely loving this project. In every way. Thoughtful gift, beautiful execution, artful final product. Very inspiring. Thank you for sharing!
Kudos to you on the project and happy 5th anniversary!
cool, so you hand traced the contours in gimp to export a .dxf?
this is a cool project.
Excellent job on the Topo, happy 5th. My wife and I are celebrating our 20th, later this month.
Great project and congratulations on the anniversary, many happy returns.
Thanks everyone! Very happy with how it turned out.
@Tookys, I created each of the topo layers using the path tool, which worked really well once I got my technique down. Then I exported each path as an SVG file which I used to cut. Tried a few different ways of getting that process to work, but this ended up being the easiest.
Looks like an awesome place to get married! Happy anniversary and well done on this!
