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Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tiled Einstein Coasters

When life gives you a sheet of tiled einsteins:

Einstein tiling
Einstein tiling

You can make coasters:

Einstein tiled coasters
Einstein tiled coasters

They’re rattlecan colored chipboard atop MDF atop cork, with the tiles cut from half a dozen sheets of einsteins. The lighter colors suffered from ineffective tape masking during cutting, producing more smudging than I’d like, but overall they look pretty good.

I was surprised at how dull the black surround turned out and how good the gray appears: rapid prototyping & iteration in full effect.

Unlike the layered paper version, these require a great deal of fiddly handwork.

I hope the MDF will prevent the premature warping afflicting the chipboard-on-cork coasters. Perhaps shooting the assembled coasters with a clearcoat would help, although you do want coasters to be a bit absorbent, lest they stick to wet cups / mugs / glasses in humid weather.