I admit it: I'm a total geek. I love electronics, programming, 3D printing, 3D art, and vintage Apple hardware. I'm always juggling half a dozen projects. I also enjoy documenting it all: my successes, my failures, my experiences... and everything geeky along the way.

Mayan King Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal Tomb Cover | Kevin Rye.net - Main

Kevin Rye

Geek Extraordinaire. Yeh, I said it.

Mayan King Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal Tomb Cover

Jun 07, 2021 Filed in: Laser Cutting
My Dad was watching Ancient Aliens and there was an episode about the Mayan King Kʼinich Janaabʼ Pakal's tomb cover. Some believe the image depicts the king at the controls of a spaceship. My Dad thought it looked really cool and asked if I could make him one for his birthday.

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It would have taken me weeks to try and draw it in Inkscape. I searched online to see if I could just find a really nice image of it that I could photo engrave using the Glowforge. As luck would have it, I managed to find an SVG file that someone had made. It's not a one-to-one copy, but I think it looks great.

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I took the file into Pixelmator Pro and filled in all the areas that I wanted to engrave.

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I then took it into Inkscape to clean up the border and change the cut and score lines to different colors.

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I dropped it into the Glowforge UI and scaled it up until it was as big as I could cut it on a sheet of 1/4" Proofgrade Draftboard.

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It took 6 hours and 20 mints to engrave and cut. It came out awesome.

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I completely underestimated the amount of work involved in peeling off all the tiny little pieces of masking tape. It took almost three hours! I had to individually pick them off with an X-Acto blade.

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I then gave it a coat of primer and a coat of white.

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I then attempted to wash in some color using some acrylics, but it came out terrible. The more paint that I added, the worse that it got. Any paint thicker than a wash just filled in all the lines completely hiding the design. What a disaster! I should have just engraved it out of a nice piece of cherry or walnut rather than try and paint it.

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Back to the drawing board.

I only had Draftboard on hand so I had to order some more sheets of cherry and hope that they arrived in time for me to complete it. It took five days to get here, which was very fast for Glowforge. In the past, I've ordered material from them that took almost 2 weeks to arrive.

I took 9 hours and 40 minutes to complete.

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I also made a stand for it out of clear acrylic.

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I think it came out really nice. It looks so much better in cherry than the Draftboard.

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