The Idea

Ages of Empire

It all happened really fast actually.

In late April I was watching a nice BBC doco about the "Ages of Britain". The hosting historian was talking about an early British king of Empire and pulled out a magnificent toy wooden hand-carved puzzle of all of the countries in the Empire which the monarch had had made for the princlings and princlets to play with so they would learn the extent of their kingdom.

It hit me like lightning that such as thing must be the wedding present for Dave.

You see back in the day Dave and I had shared an interest in geography. As a memory improvement tool (and who doesn't need that) we were playing with a flash card system (written in python of course).

One of the first sets of things we were memorising in this system was all the countries of the world -- so such a puzzle was a perfect game to play to test Dave's crazy-good knowledge and geography.

I immediately googled and it quickly became apparent that no such puzzle existed for purchase on the internet^[1], which seemed kind of incredible, but it's like that sometimes.

Within a few flashed of thought of figuring out that purchasing one was probably out of the question, it occurred to me I could make one.

Not too long before this I'd become involved with the local hackerspace (The Artifactory, Perth) and had been learning to use their CNC milling machine known as "Swarf-o-mat". My partner is going through a phase of making electrical circuits which need cases and I was going to make this necessary hardware.

Despite not being able to use the machine independently, this nonetheless is one of the most ideal tools you could hope for to make a thing such as a puzzle* [note about laser-cutters].

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[1] Since found evidence of such a thing in USA, courtesy of Shay at the Artifactory: http://www.alisonsmontessori.com/Maps_s/167.htm

Projections

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It was immediately apparent that it was a blessing in disguise that I didn't in fact find it earlier as

It was about 45 minutes from conception of the idea to having pulled down SVGs from wikipedia