Just wait until you get into the advanced V-carving and cut everything in reverse, where the letters are raised, the dragon is raised, and the material around the letters and dragon is completely removed down a bit with a raised border. Will take your signs to a whole new level.
My first signs carved out were pretty plain at first. I was getting to know the machine and designing capabilities. The first signs did look good, but now looking at them today, I see so much of the designing flaws I made that could have been corrected with carving them in a different design. Happy designing and programming.
Pretty boring as far as use of a cnc goes, but as I donât have the skill at hand with wood chisels, using a 15 degree inclined jig on my Shapeoko made my life a whole lot easier with the leg mortices for these book-matched stools / side tables. It was also handy for the steam bent stretcher mortices.
Thanks Guy. They are both 100% Yew, from a large tree cut down (for firewood!) not half a mile from my house.
The stretchers were only steamed for 15 minutes, I steamed four âjust in caseâ, of course, as I had spare, they were all perfect!
Yew seems to be a pretty wood. I watch a turner on youtube Jack Mack that likes to turn Yew a lot. I can see there was a lot of work put into those tables/benches. Will these be end tables or benches? or both?
Hey Travis, sorry for the late reply. Been super busy over the holidays. The process was pretty straightforward. Itâs just 3 pieces: an aluminum ring, with a glass round and brass round set into it. The basic process was:
mill the aluminum rings (cutting from the back to remove most of the material and create the pocket)
flip the aluminum rings and vcarve the lettering on the front
engrave / mill the brass
paint the lettering on the front of the alum and the pockets on the brass
remove excess paint and polish alum
assemble the coin. I used some precut 3mm glass rounds. Then just set the glass into the alum, add some adhesive, and set the brass on top. The adhesive isnât really necessary since the Shapeoko tolerances are spot on, but I want to add some just in case
It took a few days of figuring out various parameters. But I successfully cut aluminum.
This was a huge pain! I thought I started too aggressively, so I kept reduce my parameters until I got something to work. Eventually adding coolant mist/air blast solved it. Next: try to find out how hard I can push it.
If anyone is curious these are the parameters that worked with Isopropyl mist:
Yes, Yew is a great wood in many respects. The figuring & colouring of the heartwood can be fantastic, green wood dries rapidly with little or no degrade and straight grained wood readily steam bends. It also has great flexibility, for centuries, this, and its ready availability, made it the wood of choice by the bowmen of England, for their bowstaves.
The jury is still out as to what the stools / side-tables will get most used for.
Do not use a compression bit in aluminum or plastic. Only use upcuts, and I recommend single flutes for 1/4". You need the chips going up and out, not back into the cut. I run double those feedrates and depths of cut frequently, but using tooling that is better for the job.
Simple sepele sign for sis in law but loving the carved look. Had hard time with v-text (lines too thin/wonât carve) but read in tread to start at .2mm which did the trick.
You can see CC carving looks deep enough, then on the machine it didnât carve. Another pic after problem solving and lastly the end result.
Now sis in law wants a mixing bowl and a large cookie tooâŚ.
