{"id":1441,"date":"2025-12-30T22:01:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T22:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/?p=1441"},"modified":"2026-01-04T10:03:05","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T10:03:05","slug":"super-laser-half-coasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/?p=1441","title":{"rendered":"Super-Half Laser Coasters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have been running a series of six half marathons, in different European cities (Lisbon, Berlin, Cardiff, Prague, Valencia and Copenhagen) with some friends. I thought I’d try to create personalised slate coasters with the course maps laser-engraved on them, for Christmas presents, to celebrate the achievement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simple, you’d think, but it turned out to be a bit more complex than I thought. First, get the maps. This involved reading a few forums on the best way to get vector maps. The consensus was to use a piece of software called QGIS<\/a>. Lots of tutorials later, and I was still in the foothills of the learning curve. Eventually, I managed to work out how to build queries to import roads, coastlines and waterways to get the right level of detail for the engraving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Next, overlay the different half-marathon courses for each city. This was relatively simple: find .gpx files for each course, download, and import into QGIS. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Next, export the maps and running route as an .svg file, another slog up the learning curve, and finally I had a map! But nowhere near finished…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next came cropping the map to the coaster shape, overlaying the title, name, year, etc. Using Inkscape <\/a>for vector artwork worked well but the maps were a messy .svg and caused problems with boolean crop, lots of flattening and simplifying and trial and error later, and we finally had a decent looking .svg ready to send to my Snapmaker2 A350<\/a> laser engraving machine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Next, importing into Luban, building two different tool paths, one for the fine detailed map, and another for the filled text and route. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several test engravings on paper, then slate, to get the work’s origin, focus and depth of engraving just right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I watched a couple of YouTube tutorials<\/a> on the best finish for the slate. Painting on a mixture of 50% danish oil and 50% white spirit before engraving worked for me. This turned out to really help the contrast, making the black slate much darker so that the map stood out better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n