What did you cut on your Shapeoko/ Nomad today?

Wow! Incredible work, really love the design and the execution looks amazing!

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9 personalized mirrors and frames.

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To everyone in this thread,

Excellent work as of late. The array of projects and materials has been impressive.

Keep it up,

  • Kevin
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Cheers, Kevin! I do love seeing the broad array of projects these machines (and creative makers) can kick out.

Wife: “Can you make me one of these?”

Of course, I can!! :smiley:

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Did you give her a price?

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My wife’s usual response to “of course, I can!!” is “Will you?”…that’s when I ask her how valuable it is to her and we ballpark budgets for the project.

I tell you what though, that experience has been valuable. It’s taught me that quoting and managing customer expectation is a nightmare.

The number of times we’ve be wildly misaligned is just silly. She’d pay $200 for something that takes me 30 minutes and $12 in material…then turn around and tell me she won’t pay more than $50 for a project that’s $200 in materials alone :rofl:

These negotiates have genuinely turned out to be fun and educational.

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That sounds about right. Spending $80 and 20 hours in time to create something you can buy for $50 is tough to rationalize unless its just for the fun of it.

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Christmas gift for my youngest daughter. Started on the Shapeoko 4 with a 1/16" bit, finished by hand with chisels and knives and lots of sanding. Sapele, Sitka spruce, and ebony. (My best friend’s husband went dumpster-diving at the Martin Guitar factory in Nazareth, PA.)







The mahogany was 4.3mm thick, and some of the spruce was 6mm thick, but most of the rest was 4.something. Very tricky to get dovetails that small by hand. The Shapeoko made it a lot easier.

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Beautiful work. I have used a lot of woods but Sapele and Mahagoney are some of my favorite woods to work with. Is this a jewelry box? If it is a jewelry box now as her father it is your duty to fill it with jewelry. I give my daughter silver every year and told her husband it is his duty to buy gold for her. :grinning: If times ever get tough she can sell the silver.

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I hope she fills it with tools, but silver would be nice as well!

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The thing about tools is with the tools you can make money to buy silver.

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Killer Job that looks really great

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Nice work. In the second photo down, what is the tool in front of the chisel? It looks similar to ones I’ve fabricated for patching cracks in guitars only larger.

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Looks like a prison shank :rofl:

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Kiridash/marking knife?

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So today I tried out two new things in my CNC newbie journey… double sided tape for work holding and a test run MDF inlay. The woodworkering tape worked as advertised. So much better than using clamps on small projects. The inlay carve seems to have come out very good as well. The plug fit into the cutout perfectly with no sloppyness. I’ve got it glued and clamped until I go back and cut away the excess tomorrow. Hopefully there are no gaps :slight_smile: I’ll post the result when I get it done. If it comes out good I’l carve it in some good material instead of MDF

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Prison shank, just waiting for the toilet paper to arrive for the handle. :rofl:

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I used to go to the prison in Huntsville to work on Kodak stuff. They had a dark room with a sliding door. We had a parts cabinet on site inside the dark room that the state paid for. The state decided to discontinue that so my coworker and I went up to inventory the equipment inside and ship it out. When we moved the cabinet out behind it the prisoners used balsa wood paint sticks and split them and put single edge razor blades in it to make little hatchets. You dont know how many times I was in that dark room with prisoners working on equipment. Our lead in the lab was a guy named Red. He disappeared for a while and I asked where he was. I never asked the prisoners what they were in there for. Well Red was an arsonist and burned up his whole family. He was in solitary for trying to kill one of his fellow prisoners. If you ever go to a prison for work beware there are some dangerous people that just might have a marking knife that they will use to mark you up. Whenever I went there and left and the last gate clanked shut I always spun my tires getting out of that parking lot. Some of the good old days were not that great.

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I use that tape a lot and really like it but make sure you have the depth set correctly so you don’t go into the tape. It makes a mess on the bits. If you do, soak in alcohol for a bit and wipe clean. But if you are in the middle of a cut it can drag the mess across the rest of your project.

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Good to know. When I cut out the plug I made sure to set the cut depth to t+.1 mm and that was enough to keep the bit out of the tape.