SELECTING THE DESIGN

I recently watched a movie called My Octopus Teacher on Netflix and in the movie a man follows an octopus everyday for a little under a year and learns a lot about this amazing marine wildlife. After watching the movie and learning more about octopi on my own I decided I had a new favorite animal. Octopi are incredibly intelligent and much of their neural activity occurs in their arms. They are also masters of deception and can change colors in a fraction of a second even though they are colorblind!

To start off, I downloaded an svg from the noun project and imported it into easel. I used the easel options to cut on the shape path for the outline of the octopus. Then I modified the design a bit by adding circles of different depths for the eyes. I modified the material and dimensions in easel. I verified the depths of all of the cuts and ensured the bit on the carvey was the one that I wanted and was selected on easel. The bit that I used was the green 1/16 inch downcut bit.

Figure 1: Easel project with carve depth

CNCING

After clicking “Carve” on easel, I set up the small piece of birch plywood that I used to cut in the bottom left of the machine and fastened it down with screws and the stairs like easel instructed. The actual carve itself was very quick (9 minutes). A few pieces in the small crevices of the tips of the arms and the eyes broke off. This was probably in part due to the bit size and how the bit might have been larger than the smallest feature of the cut. This was also probably in part due to the quality of wood that I used to cut. Plywood tends to break off easier since it’s in sheets. Even though some of the legs broke off, it was fine because octopi can grow back their limbs!

Figure 2: Post CNC pieces

POST PROCESSING

I used a rougher sandpaper (200 grit) to take off the larger chunks of wood that were left over from the carvey to hold the piece in place while it was cut. Then I used a finer grain (400 grit) to smooth the edges. After sanding, I spray painted the octopi purple. Originally I was looking for blue but couldn’t find one so I just used a purple.

Figure 3: Sanding the pieces
Figure 4: Spray painting the pieces

Figure 5: The final pieces

COST ESTIMATES

Below is a chart that outlines the cost estimates for this project. 

Figure 6: Cost analysis