Hello again!

This week I come bringing you our latest project– CNC machining! We were tasked with cutting out a logo from The Noun Project. As an avid novice rock climber, I searched “climbing” and came up with this:

I decided this picture was ripe for doing a fancy 3-layer cut. I took this logo to illustrator and made it so that the hiker, the mountain, and the background were all different colors. Then, I uploaded this to Easel (by Inventables) to configure the CNC settings. I got the following image:

After consulting with Dr. Wettergreen and watching others’ work, I decided to make the mountain a 0″ cut, the climber a 1/16″ cut, and the background a 1/8″ cut. I also configured the machine to cut with a 1/8″ flat head bit, which is what was on the machine at the time, and to cut with layer depth of 1/16″.

 

I then took the exported G-Code to the Flashcut CNC Mill at the OEDK and cut away! It worked remarkably well on the first try.

 

Next comes painting. I wanted to make each layer a separate color, which proved to actually be quite difficult. First, I taped over the mountain section (which involved painter’s tape, scissors, and a lot of time with a utility knife). Then, I spraypainted the background with two layers. Then, I covered the entire background and the mountain to paint the climber. For the mountain, I decided to keep it as untreated wood, since it looks more natural (like a mountain should). Here’s an example of what the taping looks like, so you can get an idea of just how annoying it was.

Here is the final product, with fairly bad lighting. Enjoy!