Making the Board Game Woods and Water in Fusion 360

Hello, my name is Dylan Eenigenburg. I am a tenth grader attending Illiana Christian High School in Dyer, Indiana.

In this project, I made the board game, Woods and Water. I chose this game because I enjoy playing it, and I thought it would be a nice challenge to design and create. It has lots of different things going on that make it very arduous to create.

• A PLTW Engineering notebook- To sketch out designs and keep notes as well as dimensions.
• Fusion 360 software- To design the game and make tool paths for the CNC machine and designs for LightBurn.
• LightBurn software- To make paths for my laser engravings and designs that I would put on my board
• Table saw- To cut pieces of wood into workable sizes, and to cut off excess in finishing processes.
• Sander- To buff out scratches and to smooth out the wood that I was working with.
• 40, 80, and 220 grit Sand paper- To get smooth out and get off scratches on the wood, as well as get rid of burn marks from the laser cutting process..
• Computer- To make all of my designs and processes on.
• CNC Machine- To cut out my designs on the piece of wood.
• A 1/2 Inch 45 degree V bit- To cut the squares for the board game.
• Laser Cutter- To engrave the different designs that I wanted on the game board.
• A block of wood composite lined with maple- To make my game board out of.
• Hinges and screws- To attach the three segments of the board together.
• Clear Satin Varnish- To spray over the board after I laser cut it to preserve it and bring it out better.
• 1/16 inch drill bit- To pre drill the holes for the screws so that they went in easier.
• 1/16 inch thick washers- To make the boards flush with each other so the hinges fit properly.
• Dewalt drill- To pre drill holes for the screws to go into.
• Clamps- To make sure the wood wouldn't move while it was being cut by the CNC machine.
• Flash Drive- To upload my files from the computer to the CNC machine to be cut out.

First, I had to come up with all of my dimensions for the game board that I was going to make. These first dimensions would need some fixing and were changed later, but at the start they seemed to work. I made my first sketches based off of the board size itself, but I didn't base them off of the amount and size of the boxes which in turn made me have to start over half way through the design in Fusion. Once I went back and made the proper calculations according to the box sizes I was able to start making the product in Fusion for the second and last time.

This was by far the most time consuming of all the steps. I had begun to make it in Autodesk Fusion 360 with my original sketches and dimensions only to sadly realize that it was not going to work with the dimensions that I had made. After realizing that I went back and carefully re-did my sketches and dimensions. Once I had carefully adjusted my sketches and made sure that they were correct I went to work making it in Fusion. I made the outlines for the three main parts of the box first, and then I carefully went through and added all of the individual boxes that you use to move around the board. Because of the irregular pattern that the boxes had I couldn't just do a pattern or copy the sketch, I had to make all of the boxes individually which took me a few hours. Once I had all of my sketches made in Fusion I went ahead and started making the tool paths.

Making the tool paths was probably one of the easiest and most straight forward part of the entire project. I Used the 2D trace function in the Manufacture tab of fusion to help make my tool paths for the CNC machine. I used the 2D trace by just simply selecting every individual box that I had so that the 1/2 inch 45 degree angle V but that I used would cut out all of the lines. Once I had made my tool paths for the part, I made the setting different by increasing the speed per minute and the plunge and retract speed. Increasing the speed to the 100 inches per minute was safe because the part wasn't making any very deep cuts and would allow for it to just move quicker. I also changed the plunge rate to 50 inches per minute because it was doing a lot of plunging and retracting, so this just sped up the time in between it actually cutting the wood.

Once I had everything ready to go online, I needed to cut out my wood. I measured out all the specific dimensions on the wood and traced them in pencil so that I knew exactly where to cut. I left some stock on the outsides of the wood to ensure that I had enough room for the CNC and that if I was a little bit off on my previous dimensions that everything would still be ok. Once I had my dimensions laid out I cut the block of wood on the table saw and was ready to cut out the game on the CNC. The dimensions that I had or the piece of wood were 28 by 21 even though the game itself was only 26.06 by 20.

Once I had the right size of wood I took it over to the sander and was able to buff away all of the scratches and roughness that the wood had. I used 40 grit sandpaper to really get away the deep scratches, then I used 80 grit to smooth down it and then I used 220 grit for the final polishing up. Once I had the wood all even and smoothed out it was time to stain it.

I used Minwax wood finish stain to really bring out the rings and the color of the wood. I applied even strokes and made sure to do nice slow even passes so that the stain wasn't darker in some spots and lighter in others. Once I had stained it I made sure to let it dry completely before doing anything else with it.

Once the stain had finished drying I took the wood over to the CNC machine. I took out the bit that was in the machine and replaced it with the 1/2 45 degree V bit. One the V bit was securely in the machine I went ahead and properly clamped in my wood. Once the wood was clamped in I set the origin on the front corner of the wood. Then I downloaded the Fusion file onto a flash drive and hooked it up to the CNC machine. Then once the machine had all the proper code in it I ran the program and sat by to keep an eye on it.

Once the CNC had cut out all of the lines I had to cut the wood into the three sections. I purposefully left stock in between the pieces so that it would be very easy to cut them apart with the table saw. So I measured out how far away everything was and lined up the blade with the middle sections and cut the board into three different pieces. Once I had the three pieces all cut out I cut off the excess stock that I had added on before hand as a safety precaution.

This step was very straight forward. All of the things that I needed to laser engrave were simply just pictures. So, all I basically had to do for this part was insert the images into the right spot and size them appropriately. I made the images a lot smaller than the box itself because I used a V bit which took off more than just the lines I had selected. So, in order to size them properly I measured the dimensions of what I saw to be the smallest box after it had been CNC-ed and made all the images that size.

Sadly this part took quite a while, because I created all of the pictures in Fusion assuming that they would transfer over to lightburn, but they did not. So, I had to resize and re create them all in Ligthburn as well. This did not take as long as it did in Fusion though because I was able to make copies of them which made it a lot easier.Once I was done messing with the individual icons I stated on the cover for the game. I didn't have to do too much in Light burn with the pictures on the title after they were already in the correct spots. I really just messed around with the settings and changed the gamma, brightness, power, and amount of dots per square inch. Once I had the settings to where I thought the picture(s) would turn out the best I was ready to laser cut. I couldn't get the files from lightburn because I didn't have the computer anymore with the files for it. It doesn't matter a whole lot though, because the images in fusion are pretty much the exact same as in lightburn. Since I don't have the files accessible I will say what I did for all of the designs. For the individual icons I had the settings on 150 speed and 10 power, and for the images I had them on 8 power and 300 speed. But, instead of having the mode on the same as the icons I changed it to stuki for the images, which improves the quality of the images.

The cut out shapes of the silhouettes of the animals were not directly involved in making the engravings on the board, but they were necessary for engraving the little shapes on the board. Since the laser broke, I was not able to laser cut them out right away. Then, when they fixed it something was not quite right with the lens alignment because the laser was shooting out at an angle. So, I had to do some test runs on scrap pieces of wood to ensure that all of the icons would end up inside the boxes. I used the template of the cut outs as a test run to see which silhouettes would not fit perfectly inside of the boxes that I had cut out. Then I adjusted them accordingly and was able to laser cut them onto the board.

This part was a little tricky to do because when I cut the three boards apart from each other I left the stock on the two outer sides instead of on the inside piece which made the two outer pieces larger than the middle piece. So, I couldn't put the hinges directly on because the side pieces, once put in their proper place on top, weren't flush with the middle piece that they sat on. So, what I did to fix that was I added two 1/16th inch washers behind each screw so that the hinges would be flush with the board. Once they were flush I drew an outline in pencil of where the screws needed to go and pre-drilled holes in the wood with a 1/16 inch drill bit. I didn't drill very far, just enough to get the screw started so that it would be easier.

Basically once the hinges were on all I did after that was sand away some of the burn that had formed around the laser cut portions, and spray some clear satin polyurethane finish on the cover to save and bring out the laser cut portion. This made the board look more aesthetically pleasing, as well as preserve the laser engravings better.

(I also added a video of me describing the finished board, why I did what I did, and what I could have done better In the media section above for this step.)