What you get
From the bottom:
- Water: the full frame, when the frame has a sea or lake, with depth contours and sea names engraved.
- Land: the land round the place, with its neighbours' names and main cities.
- The place: its own outline, raised a sheet, with state or county lines, the capital, up to 100 towns, main roads, rivers and lakes engraved.
- Far-off parts in insets, as an atlas sets them.
Framing
The place is framed with a margin of its neighbours, in portrait or landscape as its shape suits; drag and zoom to adjust it. There's no size limit.
Framing is free. The preview of a new place costs 1 credit and its laser files 5 credits; after that, changing any setting and downloading again is free.
The files
You get one file per sheet, sized in millimetres, as SVG or DXF. Red hairlines are cuts, black fills are engraving and blue hairlines are scored glue guides, so map those three colours to three layers in LightBurn, xTool Creative Space, Glowforge or similar software. Text is already turned into outlines, so you don't need any fonts.
Every zip includes a README.txt with the design's size, sheet thickness, kerf, the layers from bottom to top and how to put them together.
Materials, kerf and settings
Most layered maps are cut from 3 mm (1/8 in) sheets: birch plywood or MDF for land, cast acrylic for water. Set the sheet thickness in the studio and the 3D preview and stack height follow it. Thicker sheets give deeper steps, but the stack gets tall quickly with many layers.
Set the kerf, the width of material your beam burns away, so pieces fit as drawn. To measure it, cut a 20 mm square from the material you'll use and measure it: the kerf is 20 mm minus what you measure.
Power and speed depend on your laser, lens and material, so run a test on scrap from the same sheet before cutting the real thing, and never leave the laser unattended.
Gluing it up
Work from the bottom sheet up. Sheets that reach the edge line up by their outer frame; loose pieces such as islands have a scored guide on the sheet below, set in a little so the piece covers the line once it's glued.
Use wood glue between wooden sheets and a glue that dries clear and won't fog acrylic (or double-sided transfer tape) on acrylic. Press the stack flat under weight while it dries.
Questions
Can I make a state or province instead of a country?
Yes. Search for it by name: states, provinces and other regions work the same way, and a state map gets its county lines.
Are the borders accurate?
They come from OpenStreetMap, simplified for the map's scale and trimmed to the coastline. Disputed borders follow the map data.
Ready to cut? The assembly guide goes step by step from test cut to frame, and the FAQ answers the usual questions.