A bit of light CNC

While I quite like the cards that come with many miniature games these days, you do need somewhere to put them. So with every new game you pick up, you need a new card box. Why spend a few seconds ordering one online, when you can spend weeks making one yourself on a noisy and dirty CNC mill?

I downloaded the Marcher Worlds and ISA logos, cleaned them up in Gimp, then imported them in Invetables' free Easel software to generate the gcode. There's a couple of small issues with the Marcher Worlds logo, but I figured it was good enough. The ISA logo still needs some work though.

After milling out, gluing up, and sanding it down, the box was looking pretty good. Like with my MTG box I decided to airbrush on a stain/varnish. I didn't really like the colour of the varnish I had used last time though, so this time I decided to try using Army Painter's Strong Tone instead - I'm pretty sure it's basically the same stuff as normal wood stain and varnish.

I wanted to go a bit farther with this one, so I ordered some glow in the dark powders from GreenStuffWorld and, along with their UV resin, tried to fill in the logo. Their Glow Pigments 2432 - Space Blue looked very close to the colour of the logo on the Marcher Worlds box, although it looked darker when mixed with the resin. After some dithering I decided to try for a steel/silver look for the outer logo details and, after some experimentation, settled on mixing a bit of Vallejo 1.063 Model Air Metallic Silver into resin for those parts.

I modified a pair of eyedropper bottles with thin metal tubes to give me a syringe-like ability to pour the resin, and used them to try to cleanly fill in the milled out logo. After pouring and curing the resin, I tried to sand the logo flat; I was hoping I could do this without taking the stain off the wood, but alas. So at that point I decided to just sand all the varnish off again - or almost all - and leave it at that.

Even though the final result is not too bad, I do feel that a lot of things went wrong. I broke like four 1mm mill bits while working on the logos. The main mill bit used to cut the box was probably a tiny bit oversized, so the pieces ended up fitting together a bit loosely. The wood wasn't very high quality and I need to apply filler in some gaps in the inner layers that were revealed by the milling. I didn't do a good job with the wood glue, leaving gaps in some places while excess glue sunk into the wood in others and interfered with the stain. I used a rotary tool during the cleanup, and took off too much material in a few places, leaving blemishes that I couldn't sand out. Applying the stain/varnish before the resin was a mistake, as I ended up needing to sand after that anyway. Some small bit of wood were dislodged when cutting the logo, which I didn't register until the resin flowed into them, ruining the logo slightly (you can see the mistakes around the nose area). Also when pouring the resin, I felt as though it was getting absorbed into the wood, as I kept pouring it level and yet the level kept going down when I looked again a moment later. So I ended up deliberately pouring too much, leading to a lot of overspill, and quickly applying UV light to cure the resin before it could be absorbed. The results were messing and required a lot of sanding work, which ended up sanding off the stained wood around the logo. Also in my tests the resin didn't cure if I added too much silver paint, so I added as little as possible when applying to the logo, and I don't know if I just didn't add enough or something else went wrong because the final results don't look very metallic. I probably could have added more glow powder too; that might have made the glow effect stronger? Finally the sanding left the resin with a rough scratchy looking surface despite my efforts to clean it up with a finer grit sandpaper at the end.

In the future I will use a separate stain and varnish, which I will apply after the resin; this will allow me to wipe the stain off the resin areas then apply a varnish to the whole box. Or more likely I won't use a varnish at all. And I'll probably treat any areas I want to pour resin into with a brushed on varnish or something first to seal them so that the resin can't be absorbed. Also I don't think I'll use glow in the dark pigments in the resin; I like the idea in general but I don't think it really does very much on a card box. Naturally I will also try to be more careful when gluing and sanding. I expect to be needing another card box soon, hopefully I'll do a better job on that one.