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This was a lot of work and turned out nicer than I thought it would. I digitized the bathymetry lines in ArcMap and I also layed out the cribbage lines using a few GIS commands. I suppose that means that all these holes are geo-referenced. I’ve never made a cribbage board before, so I didn’t know how deep the holes should be. They cut just fine with the small down spiral bit but I didn’t set my depth deep enough so I had to use a hand drill to deepen them up. I also cut a slot in the top for the pegs and a slot in the back to hang it when not in use. Oh, by the way, the blue color is a spray tint I found at the hobby shop.
All in all, a lot of work but think the gift recipient will appreciate the fact that the holes start and end right at their lake property.
I’m intrigued by doing these sort of topographic designs, but don’t fully get the process of generating the bathymetric part. Can you explain in a little more detail how to get that accurate and in vector?
I do the bathymetry by digitizing the contours from a standard topo basemap we use all the time. It’s the National Geographic Society’s 2013 basemap licensed by ESRI as one of their stock basemaps. Here’s an example of another one I’m working on:
After digitizing the contours, I fill them with the appropriate gray shade and send the map out as a bitmap. Inkscape then can trace the paths and then export to ,SVG. If you set your workpiece thickness before importing the SVG, the depths will come in as percentages of total thickness (50% gray = 50% thickness, etc).
I imagine you could do the digitizing in photoshop or something similar except you’d have to “paint” the grays for different depth zones and that sounds like more work (to me) than digitizing the contours directly to vectors in the first place. Simple lakes would be very easy, I suppose, but complex lakes would drive a person mad.
There is a free GIS software program called QGIS which should be able to do it all, but I don’t have much experience with it. There’s probably other sources for easy to use depth contours but the way I described is the method I use.
Hi Paul! Would you mind explaining your process of how your digitizing bathymetric data from standard topo maps using ArcMaps? Is ArcMaps something anyone can use or is it a subscription program?
I’ve been able to do this myself by tracing contours by importing a PDF and overlaying it in Google Earth and hand tracing (can be a tedious process). Then I export to QGIS and enter all the depth data. Is that kinda along the same lines as your doing in this post? Do you import and hand trace or will this trace for you?
I’ve never made a cribbage board before, so I didn’t know how deep the holes should be. They cut just fine with the small down spiral bit but I didn’t set my depth deep enough so I had to use a hand drill to deepen them up. I also cut a slot in the top for the pegs and a slot in the back to hang it when not in use. Oh, by the way, the blue color is a spray tint I found at the hobby shop.
