My friend Dan, who helped me build the light pipe prototype, recently got a CNC mill. He’s been asking me if there’s anything I want to make with it, and now I think I have an idea.

My in-laws live on a farm close to Holyrood, Kansas, damn near the geographic center of the United States. I thought it’d be cool to use the mill to carve, out of wood, a topographic representation of the land around the farm. Now, this being Kansas, there isn’t much change in elevation, but there are some pretty streams and enough variation, I think, to be interesting if we tweak the scale a bit.

Inspiration for this project came from jewelry designer, Erik Maes, who makes very cool topographic belt buckles.