What you choose
The shorelines and land engraving were curated by hand, so the chart reads cleanly at every size.
- Size: Small 380 × 262 mm, Medium 480 × 331 mm or Large 580 × 400 mm, all sizes that fit a laser bed.
- 4 to 10 water layers, in feet or metres, with depth numbers on the cut edges if you like.
- Your own title, a legend, and what's engraved: towns, borders, rivers, roads with route shields, parks.
Price
The preview is free; downloading unlocks the whole chart for 10 credits.
Each chart is engraved with a serial number for its buyer.
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.
Start from a famous place
Each link opens the studio there; pick your frame and generate.
Questions
Why not use the Lakes studio for the Great Lakes?
The Great Lakes are too large to frame and load in a browser at a useful detail, so their chart was built once from NOAA's depth grid and curated by hand.
Can I change the title?
Yes, up to 40 characters. Longer titles are set smaller to fit, and the compass moves out of their way.
Ready to cut? The assembly guide goes step by step from test cut to frame, and the FAQ answers the usual questions.