Cubes? Yeah cubes. Each element is a six-sided cube that has information on five of the sides. I didn't know what I wanted on the sixth side so I left it blank when I made the table. I originally had a two dimensional table that I wasn't caring for, I had all these dice out of each wood type we had on hand, and I had an idea to make my periodic table use cubes and then the designing began.

The cubes were designed with one of those web based make a box programs with the outside dimensions of 0.85 of an inch. This was the smallest I could make it with strong enough tabs while also making it the largest I could make it to fit 18 columns of the cubes on the table.

The table design is your typical periodic table design with groups and columns and what not. The spacing of the table is critical as I had to fit 18 columns and 9 rows (7 plus 2) as well as all the descriptive text. The space between the squares is simple. I put the squares the cubes fit inside by side to each other, I selected one of the squares and hit the arrow key four times. That's it. The space between the squares is four units of measure in inkscape (used to make the svgs). I made the corners of the table rounded just for personal style.

The table is cut from 1/8" maple plywood proof-grade material. Each of the rest of the cube sides are also from the same material. The rest of the table is made from three pieces of 3/16" plywood I had lying around for playing with. Two of the three 3/16" pieces have the squares cut out and the basic table shape cut out. The third piece of 3/16" is just the table shape cut out and used as the back of the table.

Maximizing the material, I made one of the cube sides be cut out of the front of the table itself as you can see in the pictures. Cutting the element symbols out of the table face also makes for a nice effect as any grains in the wood will follow through each element cube across the whole table.

Designed in this way, there is actually a tight fit on the cubes once all glued together. I left the proof-grade paper backing on the insides of the cubes while glueing them to give a little more thickness to the gaps between the cube pieces. This meant that I have less than 50% (maybe <25%) of the cubes fall out when tipping the table upside down. Due to the two 3/16" plywood pieces in the middle of the table for added depth, it means that you can easily wall mount the table and not have anything fall out.

All four table pieces are glued together and clamped so they don't move during drying. I used the squares cut out of the middle table pieces to act as a jig of sorts to keep the table from moving while clamping it.

In order to get the glowforge to engrave the text, you'll need to change all the text to path. I only uploaded the un-pathed svgs so that if any text needs to be modified or changed it's easy to change it while everything is a text field. Once you change the text to path you can no longer edit it easily. Modifying all the text to path in one go is really slow in inkscape and might make you think the whole thing locked up but it's still processing.

The -sides svg file is huge and has all the rest of the sides all made out. You'll want to copy/paste part of the sides for what fits in your cutting area in a new svg file, edit text to path and then upload to the glowforge (or other laser cutter).

Due to memory or bandwidth (I think?), in order to engrave the whole table, I actually had to break out table in quadrants and engrave 25% of the table at a time. The score/cutting was easy enough on one pass but the amount of paths to engrave basically made the glowforge app cry and crash. I did this by adjusting the color of the text/paths to different colors in the svg so I could ignore sections in the glowforge app at a time and un-ignore the section I wanted to engrave.

This thing will take all day to prep and cut once you get the svgs modified and uploaded to the glowforge app. Upwards of 8 or more hours of just the time running on the glowforge I believe. I had four "path" svg files I uploaded plus the need to do the table itself on five different passes.

Once you're done, you now have 720 cube pieces (118 elements and 2 "other" cubes at 6 pieces each) to sort and then glue together. That sorting and glueing took longer than the time it took to cut/engrave/score the whole thing. Oh and the peeling of the paper off each of the 720 sides... My wife was helping to clean off the cubes while I was glueing them together and giving her groups of dried cubes at a time. Your fingers will turn orange/brown with all that paper on the material so be aware.

The table was made to fit in the glowforge so if you're using another laser cutter that has a smaller workable area, sorry.

I displayed this table at the Tulsa Maker Faire last year (2018), the Kansas City Maker Faire this year (2019) and at the Tulsa Maker Faire again this year (2019). It got tons of "OMG I want one!" or "Where can I buy one of these?" or "That's the coolest thing I've seen here!" or many other similar derivatives.

I also made a cute little math facts table using the same process. Not as large but still had 600 cube pieces to put together. Phew.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3830320