Wooden Tic Tac Toe — CNC router project

Angela Marie
Nov 2 · 2 min read

Emerging Media and Digital Arts 407: Digital Design and Fabrication

In this project, we developed skills for creating 3D projects out of 2D elements using Adobe Illustrator and a CNC router.

My project partner and I decided to make a wooden tic tac toe board with the idea of accentuating the simplicity of the game, going a step above the traditional way of playing tic tac toe on pen and paper.

The process started with envisioning the structure of the board and pieces and laying them out on Adobe Illustrator. Next, we plugged our file into the V-Carve program to determine how we want our pieces individually cut, assigning different tool paths to each piece.

Fresh out of the CNC router

After a couple of cuts of trial and error, we worked the CNC router with ShopBot 3 and cut our final structure and pieces.

Finally, we sanded each piece, glued them together, and came out with our finished product.

Our final project consists of three walls with sliding pockets, a top that slides through to secure the board and pieces, a tic tac toe base with pockets, and 12 X and O pieces to play. The sliding top was designed by layering an engraved piece in the middle that reads “Tic Tac Toe”. On the bottom of the board, or underneath the tic tac toe base, my partner and I layered another engraved piece that reads our initials.

Final Project Submission
by Angela and Megan

Angela Marie

Written by

Artist, frequent flyer, and rosé enthusiast

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