That looks great. I really admire your tenacity for sticking with it through 7 revisions. It’s easy to get discouraged but better to learn from our failures.
Your short calendar time with the machine is certainly not apparent in that work.
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Wow! Great idea, I may try that.
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Stencil ink? Never heard of it but I’ll look into it. At about 2.5 times the cost of what I am currently using (which is only a 5 minute drive away to pick up) it would have to bring something pretty significant to the process. Thanks for pointing it out.
I’ve been working on some charcuterie boards lately. I can post one as the date has past and need to hold the other back as the date hasn’t past yet…
And also I cut these recently. A question though: what bit do you use for a through cut? I used a ¼" end mill. I know when removing material you shouldn’t remove more than half the diameter of the bit, but what about when doing a through cut? It seemed my machine was really working too make this cut. The material is fir and about 1 inch thick… it seems like it shouldn’t have worked that hard.
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For through cuts where possible avoid slotting and add geometry and cut as a pocket
and/or
and consider leaving a roughing clearance and taking a finishing pass.
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I had a productive weekend (by my standards).
I finished 5 more coasters for the kids teachers. They take forever given the 3 epoxy colors but finally done with these and the poly is drying.
Then I tried my hand at whisky smokers. Never did it before and made 10 to give to friends.
Not super happy with the smaller text. I used a 3 degree V bit but the inside of the letters was lost on a couple. The guitars are more of a novelty. They may not really be functional unless you have a smallish glass.
Each set of 5 took about 2 hours of run time. Doing the pocket instead of the contour ate a lot of time. I think that path was 38 minutes.
I have never actually used one of these and none of these are for me so I guess I will have to wait to see what the recipients say.
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What type of wood did you use for the smokers?
Nice work. I was recently working on Stephen F Austin University (SFA) using their official logo. The people at the university were trying to get permission for us to use the logo and sell the cutting boards to fund a Friends of Forestry scholarship. One of my friends is an Aggie Vet and from him and others TAMU is pretty much a stickler for using their official logo. Since you are giving these away it is not likely TAMU will ever know. However if you sell the logo items TAMU is pretty aggressive about protecting their logo.
FYI. Not telling you to not use the registered trademark of TAMU but just dont try to mass market them or you could find yourself in trouble. A lot of people here on the forum make football and other logo items and can potentially find themselves in copyright infringement.
Here is a prototype of the cutting board. Notice the copyright sign in the lower right corner. These are only prototypes and have not yet been approved.
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I wanted to try out some new cutters I got on Friday, I’ve also been wanting something to hold my collets so I can actually find them so seemed like a perfect opportunity.
Roughing was done with Harvey Tool’s 1/4" and 1/8" Variable Helix Chipbreakers. Finishing (minus the chamfer and engravings) was done entirely with Harvey Tool’s 1/8" 60° High Helix cutter.
I’m suuuuuuuper happy with these new bits, highly recommend them. Especially the Chipbreakers. Fastest clearing I’ve done while also being the quietest (by a lot).
Ignore the bite taken out of the 1/8" one 
That’s what I get for not paying attention to lead-ins. The little wing-looking things on the sides are 45° ramps so I can mount it and have it look all pretty.
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This looks great!
I take it that the material is brass?
What was the overall cutting time?
I built a prototype of one of these for whisky drinkers to try. None of them could find a single reason to use one! 
Guess one has to be really trying to impress the crowd for this to be used.
That is a great question.
I went to my storage unit and pulled out a hunk of white oak which I did bring home but it was 2” thick and I really need to replace the resaw blade on my bandsaw. I have the blade but didn’t want to take time this weekend for that activity.
So, I grabbed another rough cut board that looked like white oak.
I have accumulated a lot of different wood from different sources over the years and don’t have it organized well.
I got home and found these markings on the side which I can’t interpret.
That almost makes you think red oak, but it does not have the red oak look after milling. Especially from the side:
This is what they looked like before the coat of mineral oil.
Any thoughts on species is appreciated. Hopefully not toxic 
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Yep, understood.
I pulled it from an image online and traced. I modified slightly to make it work better in a V Carve I think.
Those and the guitar ones are gifts for a friend. I don’t have any intent to go into business selling them.
However, given the proliferation of people selling things on the internet I think any entity would need a huge staff of lawyers to fully protect their interests.
I can’t disagree with your sentiment. I have never tried it but I did have a friend requesting that I make some for a buddy of his that does use them.
It was more of an experiment and learning opportunity for me.
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I have had a live edge and resin table top with matching end tables in my shop for months. Never made or bought legs. I had a new idea that i had to try mostly for the process and geometry in making the pieces.
Again, i really enjoy how the cnc makes me view things differently now. So the table top became a perpetual calendar. Light stain on the wood and light polish done on the resin. Hand painted the 60d vcarve on the resin portions.
(A Google picture was my inspiration - the rest was me
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I tried it at first I did not get any taste just a bit of smell from it. Found out if you smoke the ice first got better results.
It seemed to be the fad early this summer. So I cut some out of white oak. Gave a few away and ended up selling about 10. I still have some sitting on the work bench though.
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Aluminum! The warm lighting in my kitchen does make it look like brass.
It was 1/2" 6061 stock and I did 5 different cuts - 3 Adaptive Clearing, 1 Bore (for the circular slot), and then a few combined finishing passes.
1st adaptive was with the 1/4" Chipbreaker at 21 minutes (7 minutes of this was the rapid movements 
)
2nd adaptive was the 1/8" Chipbreaker at 24 minutes (11 minutes of this was rapids 
)
Boring (with same bit as ^) was 7 minutes as I was worried about clogging the bit so I kinda emulated drill pecking by doing one step down for each at a time
3rd adaptive was with the 1/8" high helix at 12 minutes (with, again 6 minutes of rapid)
Last, 30 minutes for the finishing passes (with the 1/8" high helix)
So in total about an hour and a half. With almost a half hour being rapid movements which I did not realize until just now lol. I wanted to reduce the amount of material removed so I limited the cutting to the model’s silhouette which probably is why there’s so many rapid movements.
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Thanks for your expansive reply.
I really like your personalization of the bit tray, well done!
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