I purchased Old School Tactical not long ago and proceeded down the print and play route. There were some really great tutorials on the best way to mount counters (to foamies) and how to extend the life of the paper (matte varnish). But being an engineer and a bit of a tinkerer, I wondered what else I could do. (A brief tutorial is a few paragraphs down)

So I made that. It’s a hex representation of a very nice counter from Old School Tactical. It looks kind of funny right? Well, there’s a good reason for that.

I wondered how else to make a counter. 3D print. Laser cut and etch. Injection Mold. Silicon mold and resin. Lots of ways. But how to do it cost effectively beyond printing paper?

There’s a website called Ponoko that allows you to upload a vector file and depending on the colors you use, will either etch or cut. Now some of the colors above are modified so it looks better. Otherwise it’s pretty plain.

For software I produced that in Inkscape, which is an Open Source platform for creating vector graphics. What is a vector? Basically an image with dimensions. You can zoom it, expand it, all with very defined points. Whereas if you scale an image it will eventually get blurry.

Ponoko has some great tutorials on how to make the various cuts and etches. Basically we need to think like a laser. It can do two things.

Cut. A high power, narrow beam, that burns through material.
Etch. A lower power beam that can make text, or color in details.

So our design can’t be a traditional photo. For the best efficiency (cost) we need to just use outlines and minimize any shading. Think ink in your printer, you want a design that uses as little ink as possible.

Before we go into making a counter, I’ll talk price. How much is this? An optimized file with 36 hex counters on a 7″ by 7″ piece of wood was approximately $50.

$1.38 per counter.

There’s some small savings if you go to cardboard, but not much. The big sink is time. There are other companies that do this sort of work but I have no idea what the cost is. I don’t like to start bugging businesses when I don’t intend to purchase.

One thing I’m watching is Glowforge. This little guy has a 12″ by 20″ bed and can engrave and cut a wide variety of materials. It will retail for about $2,300. One example, tiles for Settlers of Catan.

Source : http://geekdad.com/2015/05/glowforge/

So here we go. Let’s make a counter!

First off, go get Inkscape. It’s free.

Then go to Ponoko and create an account. Then download the starter kit. Unzip it to a convenient directory.

Fire up Inkscape. You’ll see a boring looking white background with a bunch of buttons that well, don’t mean much to you right now.

First off we’ll make a square. Not just any square, a square with clipped counters. We’re not heathens here right?

Now just drag and draw a square. Unlike Paint, or Photoshop, this square has a dimension, an actual size.

Click on the arrow tool, the fifth button above the square. Now click on your box.

First click the drop down that the yellow arrow is point to. Change that to inches (in). Those green arrows are the width and height. I’ve got mine set just below an inch.

Now double click your box.

Ah hah! Rx and Ry are for the radius in each axis. Set that to .030. Again, make sure it’s in inch (in.).

Look! A big boring square!

Now we need to make this like Ponoko can work with it. A big black border won’t do. Not at all.

Ponoko needs a Blue line that is .01mm wide.

Press Control + Shift + F. This brings up the fill and stroke menu. Click on our counter. For Fill we want the X highlighted.

Now for Stroke paint we highlight RGB and changed the Blue to 255, or max. Now we’ve got a big blue line.

Finally click stroke style and change the width to .01 mm’s.

Now Ponoko can cut. You can also see why I embellished the hex above, the thin blue line is pretty sparse.

How about a graphic? Let’s mock up a Hetzer.

Head over to this website, www.the-blueprints.com and see a ridiculous quantity of material. They sell vector files, but we don’t need to go that route. I got my Hetzer here.

Open that file in Inkscape. Import the defaults. Now it’ll be color and rather large. We need it to be in a format that a laser engraver can handle.

Click the image you imported and then Trace Bitmap.

First off click Live Preview. It’ll give you a general idea what’s happening. Then start playing with Edge Detection variables, or Color quant, or Brightness, just try and get a good crisp silhouette. Doesn’t have to be perfect.

If you are very patient, very picky, or both, you can do better. It didn’t help that I started with a camouflage pattern.

Now we go to our Fill and Stroke menu and make sure there is no Fill (click the X). Change the stroke paint color to Red 255, 0 Blue, 0 Green then switch the stroke width to .01 mm. And it’ll probably look like it disappeared. It didn’t it’s just really faint.

It’s too big right now, it’ll swamp our counter. So highlight it and then change the size to something that’ll fit. Oh, click the lock too, it’ll keep you from having to watch it get distorted.

Just to clarify, it won’t be red. That’s just how Ponoko knows to engrave.

Now select the Hetzer, copy that (ctrl + C) , swap over to the window with our counter, and paste it. Drag it about to get it just where you want it…

Time for numbers!

We have a text button, it looks like an A. Click it. Now click somewhere inside of the counter. And start adding text! Do all of this at once. Spell check it, make sure you’re happy, because we have to make it all into vectors. And vectors aren’t text to a machine, so you’re stuck unless you delete the vector and add a new one.

Now hold down shift and click on all of your text. This selects it all and saves you some mouse work. And finally click Object to Path.

Now all of our text is a vector. Head over to the Fill and Stroke menu and add a stroke color and remove the fill color. Use full red, 255,0,0. Finally set the stroke width to .01mm.

There it is! We could now send this to Ponoko and they could cut out a single counter. Pretty cool eh? But not much of an army!

Before we make clones, I want to talk about rasters. No, not the guys in the dreadlocks. It’s how we fill inside areas. Sounds good right? Except it’s slow. Slow means expensive. Do we need it? Maybe.

Basically you select the text, add a fill with a color of 128,128,128. It’ll look gray. Ponoko will give a medium burn that will show the text better.

Remember that inkscape basic kit? Open up the P1 file. First off, delete the bird.

Then copy and paste the complete counter into the center of the orange box. Pro tip, select it once you’ve pasted it and click on Group. Now the whole thing will move as one counter.

We could copy-paste 48 more but we’d go crazy and it’d look like crap. So we will clone! First stick that one we made into the upper left corner, nice and tight, but leave a little gap.

Then go to Edit – > Clone – > Select Tiled Clone.

A window pops up on the right. We want to use the Rows, columns part.

Each counter is one inch wide and tall and we have a 7 inch canvas. So we make a row/column 7 by 7.

Click create and voila! You have 49 Hetzers! Now we’ve got an army! If we had more variety we could do one row of hetzers, another of infantry, another of, well, you get the idea.

Now Save-As, give it a snazzy name, and save it to your desktop.

Head over to Ponoko, login, go to My Designs and finally Add a new design.

If you’ve done something wrong then Ponoko will tell you in a minute or two. The cool part is they’ll tell you how to fix it too.

Now we get to choose a material.

I’ll choose cardboard, double thick, 0.264 inches, in the P1 size. You can play with this and see how different items change the price. The thicker it is, or denser, the more expensive it will be to cut.

$119.70 / 49 = $2.44 per counter.

Welp. That came out a bit higher than I’d expected. But I know why, it’s the Hetzer model I used. It has internal details, and this really adds time to the operation. When I made my Pz III H counter I had a model that was just a silhouette, so there was far fewer lines to laser detail.

But it’s an easy enough fix, go back to the main counter, remove the tank, and add another. Then clone it out once more, re-upload and see how the price shakes out.

There’s a much simpler profile. How’s the price look now?

Bingo!

$41.47 for 49, or $0.84 each.

Now you could make another version, add some grey fill and see how the price changes. But you get the idea.Or change materials, Birch veneer takes it up to $55. MDF is about the same. Or you could do Grey plastic for $40.

Lots of possibilities. Lots of things to explore. It’s a really cool service.

Now if I had a Glowforge personal laser… You get the idea.

 

 

 

 

 

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