Questions,
answered

A website for designing layered, laser-cut maps of real places: cities, lakes, coasts, mountains and countries. You pick a place, shape the design in your browser and download one file per sheet to cut and stack. See the guides for what each kind of map looks like.

A laser cutter or engraver whose software opens SVG or DXF files, sheets of wood, MDF or acrylic, and glue. You need a Google account to generate a design and download its files.

Anything that reads SVG or DXF: LightBurn, xTool Creative Space, Glowforge, Inkscape, and older programs such as RDWorks through the DXF files. Diode and CO2 lasers both cut wood well. Most diode lasers can't cut clear or blue acrylic, so with a diode, cut the water from wood or MDF and stain or paint it instead.

Maps for cities and islands with raised roads; Lakes for a lake's depths from surveys; Coasts for a harbour, bay or sea; Terrain for mountains and valleys stepped by height; Countries for a carved, atlas-style country or state; Charts for the Great Lakes and Great Salt Lake, ready-made.

Framing and setting up a design is free. A place's preview and its laser files together cost: Maps 3 credits, Lakes 5 credits, Coasts 4 credits, Terrain 4 credits, Countries 6 credits, Charts 10 credits. New accounts get 10 free credits. Credit packs and Unlimited are on Pricing.

Where the frame is and how much ground it covers; for lakes, which lake; for charts, which chart. Once you've paid for a place, changing its shape, size, layers, roads or engraving and downloading again is free, as is reopening it later.

No. Credits never expire while MyLaserMap runs.

Within fair use: up to 30 new places an hour and 300 in 30 days. Places you've already made are always free to open, change and download. It renews until you cancel, and cancelling keeps it to the end of the period you paid for.

Sales are final, because credits and files are delivered at once, but faulty files are always fixed or refunded, and billing mistakes are put right. The Refund policy has the details.

Yes, on every plan: sell the pieces you cut, but not the files themselves. Credit the map data, such as "© OpenStreetMap contributors", as the Terms explain.

One file per sheet, sized in millimetres, and a README.txt with the size, thickness, kerf, the layers from bottom to top and how to put them together. Lakes, coasts and terrain can also nest every loose piece onto your stock sheets, with an assembly.html showing where each piece goes.

Red hairlines are cuts, black fills are engraving and blue hairlines are glue guides, to score as lines in one light pass. In DXF files they're the layers CUT, ENGRAVE (set it to fill) and SCORE.

No. Set the kerf in the studio before downloading: it's already in the cuts, so an offset in your software would count it twice. The assembly guide shows how to measure your kerf.

Engrave and score first, then cut, and cut inner shapes before outer ones, so pieces don't shift once they're loose.

The files are sized in millimetres. If your software scales them, it has assumed a different resolution on import: check the size against README.txt, and set the import to use the file's own units (or try the DXF files).

Every layer's full sheet is the size of the whole map, so set the map's size to fit your bed. The loose pieces of lakes, coasts and terrain can be nested onto any stock sheet at least that big.

Either; the price is the same and a design paid for downloads in both. SVG keeps the engraving as filled shapes; DXF suits older or CAD-based software. A switch beside the download buttons picks the format.

Most layered maps use 3 mm (1/8 in) sheets: birch plywood or MDF for land, cast acrylic for water. Set the thickness in the studio to match your material so the 3D preview and stack height are right.

Bottom sheet first, gluing each layer onto the one below; loose pieces go inside the blue scored line on the sheet beneath them. The assembly guide goes through it step by step, from test cuts to framing.

On Maps, each sheet but the top one has its layer number engraved where the sheet above hides it. Nested plaque pieces have IDs such as 4·2 engraved where the layer above covers them, and assembly.html lists every piece by ID.

Streets, water and places from OpenStreetMap; lake depths from government surveys in the United States and Canada; sea depths from GEBCO, EMODnet and GMRT; heights from the Copernicus elevation model. The full list of sources is at the foot of the home page.

No. The data is simplified and smoothed for a decorative piece, and can be old or incomplete. Nothing on MyLaserMap is for navigation.

Lakes without a survey get estimated depths, marked as such in the studio. The green dots on the Lakes map show which lakes have surveyed data.

The streets and places come from OpenStreetMap, which anyone can edit at openstreetmap.org. Fixes there show up here once the map tiles next update.

Yes, when you're signed in: designs save themselves a couple of seconds after each change, and My designs lists them to open, rename, duplicate or download again.

Make a share link from the studio: anyone with it can look at the preview in 2D and 3D, without an account. It shows the preview, not the laser files.

Email support@mylasermap.com from the address you sign in with, and we'll delete it within 30 days. The Privacy policy covers what we keep and why.