The project looks good. I would make one suggestion, make less little compartments. The small compartments are hard to get jewelry out and wastes a lot of space. The side and main compartment are good bit the small pockets will be hard to retrieve objects out.
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Thanks for all the suggestions. I finally finished the box and holy moly did I learn a lot! 
It’s definitely got some production errors, but I generally like the result:
What do you think?
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Lovely and elegant!
I’ll have to make one for my mother-in-law (since she lost some jewelry while traveling a while back).
I wish MY first real project looked like this…great job.
Now you have to tell us all the details about which endmills and toolpaths and feeds and speeds you ended up using!
@holgersindbaek It looks great. I like the hingeless design for the lid - very clever!
How did the Wenge CNC? I’ve used it on a number of traditional woodworking projects and love the way it sands out…but it does tend to splinter (and they seem to hurt a lot more than your normal splinters!). I’d be interested if you used any special speeds for the Wenge itself.
Thanks @WillAdams!
Thanks @Julien! I wish I wouldn’t have taken some pictures in the process. I almost didn’t make it, since the first try of each part broke. For feeds and speeds I basically just used the feeds and speeds for pine from the Shapeoko cheat sheet. I did this because I started off by making a test of the top part in pine. I basically just kept the same program from Fusion 360 and turned down the feed percentage in Carbide Motion. Definitely not the best way to accomplish things, but for a newbie that needed to get something done fast, it seemed to work ok.
It requires you to sit and watch the machine ALL the time when it’s running. But I think I would have had to do that anyway since it’s my first project.
For the big rounded corners on the box (which I made as squircles and not fully rounded corners), the rounded corners in the pocket of the box and the rounding of the “buttons” made from wenge, I used a 6mm rounded cutter (https://www.cncfraises.fr/carbures-2-dents-hemispherique/121-fc2ds600.html).
For making all the pockets I used a 2 flute straight cutter (https://www.cncfraises.fr/carbure-helicoidale-2-dents-queue-6-00/67-fc2dh600.html). I think it might be beneficial to use a downcut endmill the next time. I don’t know if there’s a quicker way to cuts such deep pockets? That part of the program definitely took the longest time.
I used the same endmill to face off the surface. I think using a proper facing endmill might be better to use next time.
For cutting the rest of the wenge, I used a 1/8" 2 flute straight cutter (https://www.cncfraises.fr/fraises-carbures-helicoidales-2-dents/127-fraise-2-dents-317-mm-carbure-helicoidale-xl.html). That seemed to work time.
Thanks @GJM! The wenge was surprisingly easy to cut. The buttons are cut with the grains pointing upwards and that actually worked better than the mirror frame where the wenge was cut with the grains pointing along the Shapeoko. I can highly recommend cutting wenge with the grains pointing upwards. The finish it has coming straight from the machine is really nice and the grains look great when cut with a radius.
One thing that I’d like to improve on (I think I’ll end up making a couple more) is to make the buttons threaded instead of using glue. I see that CNCFraises have threaded cutters (https://www.cncfraises.fr/236-fraises-a-fileter) that seem to work on wood as well. With those I guess I would be able to make M8 threads in the box:
I’m not sure how I would be able to make M8 threads in the wenge button. Any suggestions @Julien? When I search the community, the issue of making nuts and bolts in wood seem to only have come up once (Making wooden bolts and nuts?) and it didn’t seem like a good solution have been found.
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I’m not @Julien (I can only aspire to greatness…), but just get a tap set for wood. They’re cheap and you can easily make the threads…
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@GJM That would probably work as well. I didn’t even consider that.
Maybe it would be possible to assemble it using dowels instead? I might still need to use some glue with the dowels though?
Downcut endmills are great…to avoid tearout on the top edges, but I don’t think you can push them as far as upcut endmills due to lower chip evacuation capabilities. My usage for them is to run a single contour finishing pass in a pocket roughed with an upcut, to get perfect walls and edges. But to them their own!
In wood I now tend to use deep adaptive clearing with low width of cut and high feedrate, rather than a lot of shallow passes. There is no right or wrong answer but it did reduce my cutting times significantly for large pockets and it “feels” right to use a large part of the cutting length rather than just the last 2mm all the time.
I’m with @GJM on the threading, for the female part I would just use a manual tap (both the the hole, and the buttons). CNCing the hole is quite doabled (I have a set of thread milling tools I need to try someday), but milling the threads on the buttons sounds like a lot of care and effort for something that can be done easily by hand.
Thanks for the feedback 
.
I see what you mean with the the down cut endmills. I’ll might use those the next time I do pockets like that.
I also tried making deeper cuts in the pockets, but it felt like it put a lot of pressure on the wood. I’ll give it another shot though. Would it be faster to do with an 8mm cutter? What about a facing cutter?
One error that I forgot to mention and that I don’t really understand how happened is the following… the wall is 1mm thinner on one side than the other:
On the right side the wall is 1mm thicker than the left side. I’ve checked Fusion 360 and it doesn’t seem to be an error in the program. I’ve also used metal dowels (or whatever you call them) to turn the part, so I don’t think the placement of the item has changed either.
Do you guys have any idea of what could have happened?
Dowels would work…The real question is whether you want to be able to remove the pegs. If you don’t want to remove them, then gluing them into place is way to go…why go through the effort of screws if you don’t need to?
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Glue always seem to leave some residue, which I don’t like.
But I think you’re right that threading things will be too much work.
It all depends on the toolpath settings you had. For a conventional toolpath where the first cut in each layer is essentially a slot, you cannot go much deeper than 50% of the cutter diameter. With an adaptive toolpath, helical ramping, and low width of cut (say 0.8mm), you can go much deeper (typically 200%) and the cutter/machine won’t struggle as much, just because it never ends up slotting, and basically cuts at 0.8mm stepover (in this example) with very low tool engagement. If you want to share your Fusion360 file (or even a test file with a similar pocket) I’m happy to create a few toolpaths as I would do them, for the sake of discussion.
An 8mm cutter is not really required, you could use one and increase the material removal rate, but it also produces a lot more mess, so the dust collection (and workholding…) must keep up. My go to cutter for pocketing is still that exact same 6mm 2-flute you used.
Facing cutter: I would never use one for pocketing, if only because it’s so large you need to use a very limited depth of cut, so it would take forever to mill a deep pocket anyway (and possibly be dangerous too)
About that 1mm shift: it can be a number of things, from the CAM (did you check the G-code file itself in ncviewer ?) to the zeroing, or maybe the dowels were not exactly centered ?
Don’t glue it. Just make sure the dowel needs to be tapped in. You weren’t worrying about removal before…why worry about it now?
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If you make another make the sides a little wider and insert some magnets to keep it together during travel.
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or… put magnets in the intersections of interior/exterior walls where the radius of the pocket corners gives you a little more room.
I did not know that was a thing, thank you for introducing me to it.
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That would be awesome. I’ll send you a file of the pocketing of the top park as a message. Thanks!
I made the dowels with the Shapeoko. Both in my base material (the one the stock is mounted on to) and in my stock, so I think the dowels should have been centered precisely. I don’t really know what I should look at in the G-code?! I know the G-Code is basically just coordinate code, but wouldn’t it be really weird if Fusion 360 would have generated the wrong G-Code? I’ve sent you both phase 1 (front side) and phase 2 (back side) of the top part. I don’t know if you can tell if I’ve done anything wrong?
You think just tapping it in would be enough? Would you make holes in both the buttons and the box and put in a dowel in those holes? Or would you make a “dowel” out of the button and then tap the button into the box?
Interesting idea. I think this is going to be a more stationary kind of jewelry box though.
It seems like a small detail, but I think it does something dor the overall feel. Apple uses them everywhere… for their icons, iPhones, MacBooks, etc.
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@holgersindbaek I would make the dowel out of the button…I know for sure tapping it in would be enough…as long as it’s a tight fit. I use “dowels” of end-grained hardwoods as feet for cutting boards and small boxes (I use a dowel-plug cutter into endgrain and insert them into holes cut with a Forstner bit of the same dimension) . I usually do use a dab of glue as a safety measure, but I can tell you - there have been times where I wanted to adjust the leg before the glue had set - and it is REALLY hard to do. I’ve destroyed a foot or two trying to twist it out…so I know it isn’t falling out on its own.
The problem I see for you is how to tap in the buttons without damaging the rounded heads. If the fit is right, it will take a bit of force to set them, so I would think even a dead-blow would flatten their lovely profile. I suppose you could CNC a matching concave profile into a makeshift nail set, that can fit over the top of the button and be able to use that to hammer it down without marring the surface.
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@holgersindbaek Oh…and thanks for the reference of squircles…the formula for the area of a squircle
certainly assured I would be dreaming about my college mathematics classes tonight…
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