TechShop San Jose has a Coffee Roasting workshop, and needed a way to organize the different roasts for tasting. I designed a simple plank to hold eight demitasse cups. The format of the workshop allows time to roast up to 8 varieties of green coffee beans, and the "Flight Deck" is used as a place to store the cupped results. One can go back and re-taste and compare varieties throughout the workshop.

Step 1: Design in VCarve, Cut on the Shopbot.

Once again I visited three of my favorite tools at TechShop - VCarve Pro software, the Shopbot and the Epilog Laser Engraver.

TechShop already had the demitasse cups, so I set them up in a pleasant arrangement and made some measurements.

Using VCarve Pro, I drew a 7.5" by 13" rectangle, rounded off the corners and added 8 circles for the cups. Using the pocket function, I made a path to cut a .25" deep pocket for the cups to sit in, and then did profile to cut out the plank.

I tested it on some cheap wood (not shown) and then cut the Real Thing in some bamboo plywood I found in the scrap pile.

Step 2: Label It With the Laser Engraver

I went back to VCarve and exported the circles and outer profile into a DXF file, which I then opened in Corel Draw.

Once in Corel, I added some labels to enumerate the cups and added a TechShop logo and "Coffee Flight Deck" to the end.

After the first one took more than 20 minutes to engrave, I optimized the process by engraving "Coffee Flight Deck" in one pass and the numbers and logo in a second pass, reducing the engraving time to 13 minutes.