I was thinking about Christmas gifts for young family members and I wanted to get an activity that would occupy the kids for some time. My preferred option was to find something that did not require batteries or connecting to the mains electricity. I thought about crafts that were easily understood and managed by say… 3 to 8 year old children and decided to see if I could produce an unfinished piece of wood that would need painting. Ta Da!
I drew a quick design in Affinity Designer and saved it without the colour as an SVG file. I separated the component parts and ingested them into Carvco Maker, where I output the GCode into gSender. I used a 3.175 x 22mm carbide downcut endmill from Rennie Tools and settings were 10,000 RPM with 0.5mm stepdown and 50% stepover and the spindle was moving at 1000mm/min.
The wood used was 15mm thick American maple and it did not show any scorch marks or signs of excessive heat generation during the milling operation. I had arranged the components to be cut onto my workpiece within Carvco Maker. I had forgotten that the 3.175mm cut would be doubled when two pieces were adjacent to each other and this led to several small errors when the cutter had impinged on a previously cut component.
I held the workpiece using 3M painter’s tape and CA glue. I did not add anything to the thickness dimension of the wood and the milling operation just broke the wood surface at the bottom and touched the painters tape. No cut marks were seen in the MDF substrate under the painter’s tape.
Overall… I think the project will provide hours of painting fun and the unfinished wood deals neatly with the issues around chemicals and toxins in items that are not kept by the person who made them. All comments are welcome.
Unretouched image of the final project.
