Laser cut city maps with streets that hold together

1. RoadsWalnut, 3 mmPieces only: major streets cut out and welded to the frame band
2. LandMaple or birch, 3 mmSolid plate, water cut out, minor streets and the name engraved
3. WaterBlue acrylic, 3 mmSolid base that shows through every river, lake and bay

The manual way makes you sort roads by hand. One maker pulling a neighborhood from OpenStreetMap through QGIS and Inkscape called it "quite a lot of manual labor." Another got 146,696 objects from one Manhattan export, and ungrouping them ran overnight. MappSmith groups roads for you: Interstates and highways, Main roads and avenues, Local streets, Driveways and lanes, and Walking and bike paths.

Each group gets one operation and one width. That matters because map data changes a road's type along its length. If the highway and its exit ramp had separate settings, a cut road could end in mid-air.

One maker's tip from her LightBurn city map build: score roads instead of engraving them. It's faster and the roads stand out more.

Every layer has a Body setting. Solid plate is the whole sheet with shapes cut or engraved into it. Pieces only keeps just the shapes, like the street network, held together by the frame band. Frame only is the band with the middle removed.

A pieces-only street layer on its own was "too floppy" in one maker's build, and edge pieces became islands that fell off. Her fix was to merge the road ends into an outer frame. MappSmith does that weld on export. If any piece would still be attached to nothing, the download stops and tells you, rather than handing you a file that cuts into loose parts. Add another road group so the network joins up, or widen the band.

Water is what makes a city map readable from across the room. Cut the rivers, lakes and bays out of the land layer and a blue acrylic base shows through. If you'd rather paint the water, one maker uses 1/8 inch MDF for the painted base because thin plywood tends to warp when painted on one side.

The City + parks style engraves parks and green space onto the land layer. The Detailed style adds filled parks and engraved buildings. Buildings are a lot of burn time at city scale, so save them for small, dense downtowns.

Crop to something people recognize: a shoreline, a river bend, the street grid, a downtown. A test map at one makerspace got blunt feedback: "what's a map without street names." Put the city name, coordinates or a date on the frame band so the piece explains itself.

1. 01Frame the citySearch the place, pick circle, square, heart or a state outline, and set the finished size.
2. 02Check each sheetThe "This sheet" picture shows one layer exactly as it comes off the machine. An amber warning means a layer would cut blank.
3. 03Preview in 3DLeave Welded on. It shows pieces joined the way the export cuts them, and warns about anything loose.
4. 04DownloadOne SVG per physical layer, plus LightBurn, xTool or DXF if you tick them. Files are millimetres at finished size.
5. 05Cut and glueGlue land onto the blue base so the water shows, then the street layer on top, lining its frame up with the land edge.

Test on cardboard or chipboard before you cut good stock. It's cheap and it shows you which streets are too thin for your machine.

For reference: one seller lists a personalized layered wood map at $89 with free US shipping, and a Milwaukee map at $159 in sizes from 11x14 to 34x34. Price climbs with size, layer count and framing. Credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors" on the listing and packaging (how).