Marital Arts Belt Display

Like the airplant "reef", this was another Christmas gift (the CNC machine and 3D printers got a lot of use this year)! I wanted to make a personalized display for martial arts belts for my Dad by wood burning designs on a pre-made display, but wasn't a huge fan of what I could find online, so I started from scratch.

I began with designing the medallion for the very top of the display, which featured the martial art school's logo. I was unable to find the logo as a DXF (or any form of vector file), which is what Fusion needs to "build" a sketch, so I had to take an image of the logo and convert it to a usable format in Illustrator. This is a bit of a time intensive process, as the exported DXF from Illustrator really needs to be as clean as possible for Fusion to be able to properly create closed sketch with it. No overlapping paths, no double lines, no open paths - otherwise Fusion may not produce usable geometries for tooling or extruding. The medallion was going to be 3D printed, and filled with colored resin to match the logo's colors, so the logo was "sunken" into the main body.

After printing, the medallion was sanded and primed, then painted and sealed before pouring resin. The sealing was really important for this particular piece; the sealant acts as a "barrier", so if there were any voids or gaps between print faces, the sealant would prevent resin from leaking into the print or other logo regions. Using tiny syringes, I filled each region with the appropriate colored resin to emulate the logo, which worked out better than expected.

Finishing the rest of the display was fairly straightforward, with the only hang up being how to best design the top piece that would hold the medallion. For the medallion, a small channel would need to be routed on the top face of the piece, but holes are also needed on the bottom of the piece for the columns to rest in. The CNC machine is a 3-axis machine so it can't directly machine multiple faces of a work-piece, and I didn't want to flip the work-piece (which would be necessary if features were on both sides of the top plate), so the easiest solution was to just split the top into two pieces and assembled after machining. After some sanding, gluing and sealing, the display was done!