Personalized Jenga is a great combination of traditional beginner woodworking with basic CNC carving. I made five different block styles using Carbide Create. Then I made a jig to hold the blocks which allowed me to have a consistent “zero” location to start the carving.
Here’s the CNC in action:
They come out like this:
To get the names painted I needed to seal the wood so the colors wouldn’t “bleed” due to capillary action. I used quick drying spray shellac. Next I lined up all the pieces for each color and painted those:
Then a trip through the surface planer to remove the green overspray, leaving the letters nicely painted.
I made them waterproof with more coats of spray shellac. They looked like this when they were done:
And they played like this:
