OK, I have to admit the brass “racing stripe” would look nice.
I don’t think it’s a technically difficult project. You can use end mills to cut wood and/or brass. Biggest challenge is going to find a committee that will allow you to machine wood and metal on the same machine.
I agree that you should make the laminated brass/wood sheet first and then do the cut outs (your option 2). You’re never going to get it aligned any other way. You will need to heavily “score” both sides of the brass and the sides of the wood that will glue to the brass in order to get some “tooth” for gluing. Picture making a bunch of cross hatch cuts with an Xacto knife/file edge. Epoxy seems like a good choice. Your brass may get warm/hot during the machining and you don’t want a glue that will let loose when it gets hot (like CA glue). After gluing, send the wood/brass sandwich through the thickness sander to have a nice, smooth parallel “blank” of your desired thickness.
The pips need to be a diameter that matches a standard round router bit or ball nose end mill. I don’t know anything about domino pips, but I suspect they aren’t deep enough to qualify as a full hemisphere, so you have some latitude here. Similarly, you want the width of the “dividing line” to match a known bit … either a small end mill or a V-shaped bit.
IF the woodshop committee permits it, this would be a fairly simple job on the Multicam. Cut the pips/dividing line, then cut the profiles. I would use a two flute 1/4" end mill instead of a router bit to cut the profiles. Leave “tabs” on the bottom so your dominos don’t fly out of your work piece. The tabs should be thin enough that you’ve completely cut through the metal, and then you will hand finish the tabs.
In theory, the small Shapeoko 2 is also capable of this. It’s easy to learn and easy to use. @jphelps is teaching a Shapeoko class tomorrow and there are still a few spaces open.
However, there are a few caveats about the small Shapeoko.
- It’s a low HP router so you’re going to have to make a lot of very shallow cuts and it’s going to take a long time. This can be easily programmed.
- Spindle is small. The largest bit you can use is probably 1/8" … even if you can hold a 1/4" bit you probably don’t have enough HP to drive it cleanly.
- A limitation of using small bits is the cutting depth of the cutter. Length of cut (LOC) on a 1/8" cutter is typically 1/4" or a little less. In other words, you’re not making a half-inch thick domino if you go this route.
- The gantry tends to move around when you change bits, so your first cutter may not be well aligned with your second one. Try to program it so you need to use only one bit.
On the Shapeoko, IIWM, I’d use a two flute 1/8" ball nose end mill for all the cuts. You can cut the pips with that, the dividing line at lesser depth, and you can still cut the profile with a ball nose end mill. It’s just going to dig into your spoilboard (yes - you need to provide your own spoilboard, you can’t just dig into the machine base). You still need to leave tabs.
I didn’t realize dominos were two-sided … if there’s nothing on the back side of your dominos then it’s much easier to do.
Machine shop will not allow you to machine wood, so if you take David @Photomancer 's suggestion, you will be gluing the wood to the brass after machining. HAAS also has the longest learning curve of the options.