Big Mike

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for round two. Our second assignment this week was two make two identical copies of a noun cut into a block of wood with a CNC machine.

I decided to use Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc and Monsters University as my noun.

After I found my noun, had to get my wood ready. I took the piece I was given and another that I found, and applied stain in order to make them look nicer

 

Now it was time to get ready to cut. I loaded the file in illustrator to get rid of the writing, and then uploaded it to easel. There, I made the wood the appropriate size and changed the depths of the eyes, mouth, and body to .35 inches, .3 inches, and .25 inches, respectively. I then changed the drill size to 1/32nd inch, and followed the instructions on Easel, and hit cut.

As the picture below will show, this first cut didn’t turn out well. The edges were way to deep for a 1/32nd inch drill bit, making them look pretty terrible.

Midway through the cut, I stopped it and changed to depths to .25 inches for the eyes, .175 inches for the body, and .1 inch for the body. I then deleted the parts that had already been cut and hit cut once again. Again, this was unsuccessful as the drill bit broke less than 5 seconds into the cut.

Because that piece of wood looked really bad, I went and got another and stained it once again. Once it dried, I took another crack at using the CNC with a 1/16th inch bit that wouldn’t break. I decided to keep the same depths as last time (.25, .175, and .1 inch).

To my relief, these cuts turned out much better than the previous ones and were ready for post=processing.

To start with, I tried to clean up all of the dust on the insides of the pieces by rubbing a small piece of medium coarse sandpaper (220 rating) along the edges that I cut.

 

My last step was to sand the rest of the wood down. I started with the same 220 rating sandpaper, then used 400, and finally used 1000 to make them extra smooth.

At last, my pieces were complete.

I am pleased on how these cuts turned out. The best things about them are that the design is complex and the combination of the cut plus the stain make them look aesthetically pleasing. This doesn’t mean that they are without their problems, however. Both have a little bit of excess material sitting at the bottom of the cut I wasn’t able to remove with the sandpaper. In addition, the second one I cut (one on the left in the picture above) had a small part of the eye and a couple of teeth chip off during the cut.

Costs: I spent 3 hours working on this project in total. I used three small pieces of wood, which cost roughly $5 each, a little bit of stain which I’ll estimate to $2 dollars, broke a drill bit worth $5, and spent half and hour on the machine which I’ll estimate to be $10. Valuing my time at $15 an hour, that makes the total cost of this project $77.

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