Peg Maps · Board design review

The boards were right, and they still looked unfinished.

Three engraved map boards, rebuilt. The geometry and data were already real — the problem was that a thin subject on a big board left most of the surface empty, and the entire border treatment was one plain rectangle.

What changed, counted

1 → 40+
Border elements
one rectangle → real frame
0 → 5
Data panels
stats, rapids, landmarks
106 → 128
Text objects (MF)
+22 real labels
256 → 272
Engrave paths (MF)
+16 ornament

Board 01 · 24 × 18 birch

Middle Fork of the Salmon

The river runs corner to corner and left roughly a third of the board bare. Nothing framed it, and nothing filled it.

Before
Middle Fork board before: thin river across a mostly empty board
After
Middle Fork board after: surveyor border, stats and rapids panels, scale bar
Border
Surveyor frame. Triple rule, hatched corner blocks, chart tick marks along all four edges — replacing a single 0.5mm rectangle.
Lower-left void
Two cartouche panels. A stats block (99.7 river miles, 3,000 ft drop, 40 named rapids, 9 airstrips, 4 hot springs) and a list of the nine rapids that get your attention.
Scale
Graphic scale bar with alternating filled feet, computed from the board's real projection — not a decorative ruler.

Board 02 · 24 × 18 birch

The Grand Canyon

Existed only as an old first-generation board — no border system, no panels, no landmark context.

Before
Grand Canyon board before: bare first-generation layout
After
Grand Canyon board after: surveyor border, stats and landmark panels
Data
37 camps + 6 landmarks from the NPS campsite list, positioned by river mile and calibrated against OSM tributary mouths.
Landmark panel
Listed by river mile — 61.5 Little Colorado, 87.8 Phantom Ranch, 116.6 Elves Chasm, 143.5 Kanab, 156.8 Havasu, 179.4 Lava Falls.
Wood
Moved to birch, matching the Middle Fork. The walnut render came out a muddy brown that wasn't true to the stock these will actually be cut from. Chasing that exposed a real render bug — see the colour note below.

Board 03 · 11 × 14 birch

Idaho Hot Springs

The sparsest of the set: a bare state outline, ten dots, and a large empty interior.

Before
Idaho hot springs before: bare outline with ten dots
After
Idaho hot springs after: rivers, lakes, ranges, heirloom border, stats panel
Interior
Context layers. Fifteen named rivers, seven lakes, three mountain ranges and eleven towns — so the springs sit in a landscape instead of a void.
Border
Heirloom frame. Double rule, eight-point corner rosettes, rope bands top and bottom.
Projection bug
Idaho was being cut off. The frame fit the union of outline plus rivers, and Snake River tributaries run past the state line — scaling Idaho until its eastern border fell off the sheet. Now pinned to the state's own bounds.

Three findings that carried the rebuild

Root cause

The border was one line of code

The entire frame treatment was a single rectangle appended to the engrave list. Every board inherited it. That one line is why all three read as unfinished, regardless of how good the underlying data was.

Method

Eyeballing the mockup put panels on the river

First placement collided with the map because I guessed coordinates from an image. Built a free-space prober that prints a 10mm occupancy grid of the board; every panel since is placed against measured empty space.

Correction

A fabricated number got caught

An early stats panel claimed "4.5M wilderness acres." The real figure is 2,366,757 per BLM and USFS. Corrected, with the citation written into the theme file next to the value.

Render bug

Every board was rendering as the dark tone

The grain blend weighted to ~1.4, so the mix factor saturated and the wood's base colour was almost never shown — birch came out muddy brown no matter what the setting said. Sampled RGB confirmed it: mean luma 78 against a birch base of 222,193,148. Rebalanced to ~0.5; luma now 150 and all three boards match within one point.

Making a real one

The test board

Getting a physical unit made turned out to be a sizing problem before it was a money problem.

Middle Fork board reflowed to 584 x 284 mm
The orderable board — 584 × 284 mm, reflowed to fit
Laser file proof: blue cut lines, red engrave lines
The laser file itself — blue = cut, red = engrave
Vendor
SendCutSend ruled out, despite being the best fit on paper. They cut Baltic birch at 44 × 44 in — the full 24 × 18 fits easily. But their own FAQ: "We do not offer laser engraving or solid etching at this time." Our board is ~95% engraving. They could cut the blank and the 39 peg holes and nothing else.
Size
The 24 × 18 doesn't fit Ponoko at all. Their largest sheet is 790 × 384 mm; our board is 609.6 × 457.2 — 73 mm too tall. No Ponoko material in any size can make the flagship. Reflowed to 584 × 284 mm to fit their solid-hardwood sheet with 12 × 7 mm clearance.
File
The colour convention was exactly inverted. Ponoko reads blue as cut and red as engrave; our exporter used red for cut. Uploading it as-is would have had the laser cut along every river, label and border line and the board would have fallen apart. Also moved peg holes into the cut layer — as engraving they'd be surface marks, not holes.
Caught
The Idaho locator was a solid filled polygon — a 38 × 61 mm solid burn, a scorched block instead of a fine outline. Invisible in the mockup because it drew lightly there. Only surfaced when the actual laser file was proofed.

What's still weak

Before this goes near a customer.

  • No price yet. Ponoko only quotes after upload and the order isn't placed. A smaller, simpler board came to ~$102 earlier — this one should cost more, but I have no verified figure.
  • The orderable board isn't the one in the photos. 584 × 284 mm is letterbox; the product renders are the 24 × 18 poster. Same design, noticeably different object.
  • The macro crop is the weakest render. Grain is finer and more regular than real timber at that magnification. Convincing at hero scale; would not survive side-by-side with a real photograph.
  • Prices are placeholders. $248 / $248 / $168 are numbers I picked, not researched against comparable listings.
  • No physical proof yet. Nothing here has been cut. Hole spacing, peg fit and engraving legibility at true size are unvalidated. Peg holes are 3.2 mm against a ~3.175 mm cribbage peg, and laser kerf widens the hole.
  • Wood tones are approximations. Procedural, not sampled from real birch under real light — the current tone is a corrected guess, not a colour match to actual stock.

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