@Rafi Love this! Where did you get the block B from? Would love to make one of these for my niece that just got engaged at Thanksgiving.
For fine lettering instead of ora mask which is terrible, I use a method learned from Rob Shuster @ Sidewinder Drums.
Sand your piece and seal with Sanding sealer or Lacquer or anything that is easy to sand off. Then use a water base wood filler like plastic wood, take a small amount and thin down with water to about the consistency of wood glue and wipe a liberal coat over the entire piece keeping one small area for resetting z-zero later.
After drying, I use a heat gun to speed up drying, carve as normal using bare area for zero. when done carving use sand sealer, lacquer, or anything to prevent bleeding, paint , stain or epoxy. When dry sand just enough to remove down to the original sealer.
I have used this on both stained and unstained materials with excellent results, however with stained materials, I think I’m going to try Polycrylic over stain just to possibly protect the stain a little better.
I would suggest trying on somm test pieces just to see how it works.
I like it because I’m a sloppy painter, and I get crisp clean lettering and objects.
I’m actually a very good detail painter, but it’s terribly inefficient when I could use some type of masking and spray paint instead. I’m screen capping your comment for later use. I think I’ll give that a try. I’ve tried using oramask a few times, but even over a lacquered surface, I can’t get it to adhere well enough to seal through a carving. For the life of me, I don’t know how these guys in videos have such luck. I’ve seen them sand down to 120 and stick it right on without any problems or other surface prep.
@Dhuston99 I have a collection of jpg & pngs for the whole alphabet. Which is the time consuming part if I need to make one and convert it into splines for smooth sweeping arcs on all the flourishes. I rarely get lucky for some one who has a last name with a same letter which I have hopefully already converted into splines previously.
Check out Rob’s U-Tube channel and look at his Amazing Grace sheet music video. I just did 2 clocks with 1/2 in tall lettering, one color and 4different colors for the numbers all jumbled up. Took about 15 min with bottles of craft paint with no bleeding or screwups from masking
“The Tooth Fairy Was Here”
I got the idea to make this while listening to a mother comfort her daughter who was in the next exam room during my semi annual dental check up.
The concept is to have the child put the tooth in the box with the plain lid and place it on their nightstand, dresser, or under their pillow. Once the child is sound asleep, you put the $$$ in the box with the engraved lid and sneak into their room to “swap” the boxes.
The most difficult aspect was figuring out the lid/base tolerances so they snugly fit together without binding and to minimize sanding. Did I mention that I hate sanding small parts!?
Another design point that had to be considered was to ensure that the machine didn’t have to be re-zero’d in between cutting the “top and bottom” tool paths. ie: from engraving the lid to cutting out the base and lid pockets on the reverse side of the stock.
Setting up a rigid 90-degree corner block on the spoil board ensured the stock would properly be positioned (aligned) when the stock was flipped over…assuming the stock’s left side corners were cut at exactly 90-degrees and that the stock’s exact dimension’s were correctly entered in the job’s setup.
It shouldn’t be necessary to point out, but I will, 
that centering the design on the stock is critical since the stock will need to be flipped over between engraving the tops to cutting the top and bottom pocketing tool paths, as well as cutting out the boxes.
Also, please note that the project was set up using multiple tool path groups so that they could selectively be enabled or disabled, depending on the side of the keepsake box being cut. This is more about my preference and/or propensity to simplify the job’s tool path logic than it is about the job’s requirements.
Anyway, my niece’s daughter will be receiving her ’Tooth Fairy’ keepsake box early this week, once the USPS delivers them. 
Tooth Fairy Boxes.c2d (676 KB)
I tried uploading the *.c2D file, but I guess it wasn’t accepted. Don’t know why, but in case it was something I did, I’ll try attaching/uploading it to this post.
Hopefully it works this time.
Tooth Fairy Boxes.c2d (676 KB)
I am sorry but I gave you some bad info. the person I was referring to’s name is Rob Sandstrom not Shuster Sorry but was having a brain fart I guess.
I made this for a friend who really seemed to like the little ‘This is fine’ comic strip by artist KC Green. It’s actually the first project that I completed on my new 4x4 Shapeoko 5.
It’s made of 1/4" MDF that was hand-painted and then glued together afterwards. As a fun twist, though, I added some flickering LEDs to simulate the flames (here’s a link to a video of that).
I wish I had taken more pictures during the process of making this, but I didn’t know about this contest at the time and was kind of in a rush to finish it before Christmas.
The LEDs are pretty well hidden in there…
I started the project in Affinity Designer, where I replicated the drawing and then split everything up into layers for the cuts. I spent a lot of time organizing everything, which you can kind of see on the right side. I was also trying to think about how it would look in 3D because I couldn’t think of an easy way to simulate that.
You’ll notice that a lot of these lines didn’t make it in to the actual cut. I was thinking about doing some very shallow contours as a guide for painting, since I was nervous about free-handing it. I ended up abandoning this idea because I couldn’t get it to work right and didn’t have the time to play around with it. I think I did okay with the paint…mainly because the original art had a hand-drawn look to it anyway.
This is what the tool paths looked like on a 2x4x1/4 sheet of MDF. The last three panels on the top row have channels for the wiring and a cutout for a battery box.
I wish I had taken more pictures of the painting and assembly process, but I get hyper-focused on projects like this and always end up forgetting.
For paint, I just used some simple craft store acrylic…nothing really special about that.
I bought 100 of the little flame LEDs off of Amazon for $10. They were available pre-wired with leads, which I would have loved to have used, but the resistors they used were selected for 12V and I wanted to use 3V (2x AA batteries). I ended up using 47 Ohm resistors for that.
The picture below shows the mess of wiring. I made a mistake by gluing the back two panels together too early, which made it a nightmare to piece together the wiring and not have it get pinched or anything. I’m usually more particular about those things, but I was frustrated at that point and just wanted it to be finished!
For gluing everything together, I used wood glue but tried to keep it more on the outside edges so it didn’t leak into the design.
Once I had it together, I was really worried about getting the tabs off. I use a flush trim bit for my router, but the material was so thin that I couldn’t position the bearing and the cutting portion of the bit. I remembered that I had a band saw sitting in the corner, and that worked great since I could just clean up the sides all at once.
One other thing I did was to coat the sides in drywall joint compound to kind of hide the lines between the layers. Once that dried up, I sanded it all down and painted the outside with black paint.
I honestly don’t know how long all of this took me, since I did it gradually. If I had to guess, maybe 16 hours? Of course a lot of that was the design and me figuring things out, so I could do a second one quicker. I kind of wanted this to be a one-of-a-kind gift, though, so I doubt I’ll ever make another (also, since it borrows work from someone else I wouldn’t feel comfortable selling something like this).
If there any questions I can answer about the process, I’m happy to talk more about it. Also, sorry about the lack of pictures–will try to do better next time!
The Carbide Create file is below if anyone is interested.
ThisIsFine.c2d (552 KB)
“This is Your Heartbeat…This is your Heartbeat While Fly Fishing” charcuterie board.
Materials: Hard White Maple Board with Black Walnut Inlay.
I made this board to donate (“gift”) to my local Trout Unlimited Chapter for their annual fund raiser auction.
Hopefully they’ll get some respectable bids on it. If not, hey, it was fun to design and fabricate. Besides, their auctions are always fun so it’ll be a triple win. 
For this project, even tho I mill my stock and my machine is trammed, plus my spoil board has been surfaced, I still decided to add a 0.00" to 0.02" surface prep McFly tool-path pocket to ensure that the entire board’s top surface would be perfectly flat before cutting the inlay’s female pocket.
Since the first tool-path surfaces 0.02" off the board’s stock, the female inlay pocket’s parameters had to be adjusted to a use a starting depth 0.02" with an ending depth of 0.130", for a total depth of 0.110" which matches the values I used for the male inlay.
Doing so paid off…using the Advanced Vcarve “Inlay Mode” feature for the male inlay (start @ 0.00", end at 0.110") resulted in a perfect fit.
For this project, adding a surface prep tool-path only added 6 minutes of machine time, which I feel is negligible so I have now added a “surface prep” tool-path to all of my inlay jobs.
Naturally, this project requires two jobs, one for the main charcuterie board and respective surface prep and female inlay pocket tool-paths, and another job for the male inlay insert. Both jobs are attached below.
Not sure if it’s allowed, but since I’ve gone off to college, I haven’t had much time to spend creatively with my machine. However, if I am allowed to post past projects, here is a sign I made for a teacher of mine to give as a housewarming gift to a friend of hers. She requested a sign they could hang in their outdoor kitchen with eyehooks and a chain, thus it needed to be quite thick to accommodate the eye bolts. We ended up deciding on an oak background with popped walnut lettering. I began designing it in Carbide Create, although I redid it in Fusion 360 to send rendered pictures, and then in the end, I created the G-code in Carbide Create. I designed the walnut and the oak to mesh using quite a few locating pins. I glued up two 1.75 inch thick oak boards to create a 31” by 18” blank to carve the sign. From there I used Oramask 813 during carving and then painted the V-Carved text and line portions black. For the walnut, I carved it from the back to create the pins and then the profile. This was incredibly fragile after leaving the machine, and I broke it on multiple occasions, fortunately this was usually reparable although I did have to completely redo the “EL” portion after a pretty significant break. After the paint was dry and the pieces had been completely sanded, I glued them together and applied 5 or 6 coats of Helmsman Water Based Spar Urethane. I re-attached the eyebolts, and it was ready for delivery.
Here is the final sign and a few in progress pictures.
Here are some of the progress pictures. The top one is the carving of the walnut, and the second is a test fit of the walnut on the oak portion being carved.
I made a bunch of custom coasters as literally the FIRST cuts on my brand new Shapeoko 5. Just assembled it, and leaned on my experience from the Shapeoko 3 and had it cut 20 coasters all on one gcode file.
After the detail features and pockets were done, I pause the machine, and pour clear epoxy resin in, letting the surface tension bubble up over the top to make sure I get enough for each one.
Resin tips:
-Put each of the 2-part bottle is scalding hot water for 20 minutes to preheat and make it easier to get bubbles out.
-Stir with smooth plastic stir stick, go slow, be thorough to keep bubbles out.
-Pour into mold slowly.
-Don’t be like me and assume the garage floor is flat enough and let the over-pour run off the side of the board and get onto your brand new machine bed and into the T tracks.
-Use small butane torch a couple times over next hour or so quickly over the top to pop all the bubbles near the top.
-Repeat after me: BUBLES ARE THE ENEMY
All this takes place with the wood still firmly mounted to the machine… do not move anything.
Then after about 48-72 hours the remaining part of the toolpath can be ran to plane the cured epoxy surface and cut out the outside diameter freeing each coaster.
Post processing wise, I sanded the top lightly until the toolmarks disappeared. The final grit used determines how hazy the clear resin looks and how much contrast the raised graphics have from the background pocketed areas.
Apply wax finish to enhance the red oak color, protect, and mostly to hide the flaws in my resin pour!
What I would do different:
-Way too thick for what I was planning, I should have started with thinner oak.
-Should have planed to desired thickness first. I tried to do that after, but ended up shooting one out of the dewalt planer and injured myself… so decided they were good enough after that incident…
-Cut a pocket a little larger than the total diameter as first step to create a levy to guard against accidental resin overspills.
-Plumbed dust collection into the orbital sander at end.
I am really happy with how these ended up looking, the pictures don’t capture how impressive the clear cast 3D effect looks in-person.
Challenge #30? … HOLD MY BEER The mechanical beer holder
I made this for my Pop’s as we both always use the saying Hold My Beer (I’m looking at you @Luke ). It was pretty challenging as it is comprised of around 93 parts (not including the 46 nuts and M3 screws) Programing an Arduino and making it move where the fingers and thumb don’t bind and it actually holds a beer!!
Figuring out the geometry and movement of the fingers and thumb was very much trial and error as you can see in the failed parts picture. But hey, every failure is a lesson learned.
Over 50 parts were cut out on my Shapeoko 3XXL mostly plywood with the letters being Expanded PVC. I have attached the files on CutRocket I just uploaded it so its pending (link might not work) Link
Any votes would be appreciated as I just bought a Z-Plus and a VDF spindle would look mighty fine on my machine LOL but good luck to everyone here, some pretty awesome projects!
Thanks all for the submissions! Going to have to figure out the best way to handle voting. I’ll be working on creating that thread today.
You’ve won… a place in my heart!
Maybe each submission has its own post on one thread and the most hearts wins. That would be easier to see photos of each than having a poll.