These last few few weeks in class we were tasked with using the Carvey CNC router to cut a noun out of wood. After reading the project description I decided that I wanted to try and cut the Wiess crest. The crest has a ton of little detail and so in order to effectively cut the majority of the detail I had to delete some of the detail in Adobe Illustrator. I had Adulfo help me figure out how to ungroup the details in the .stl that I had downloaded, and then was able to delete elements one by one. I could then export the file from illustrator and upload into Easel to set up the cut on the carvey. While adjusting the file in Easel I saw pretty quickly that inorder for me to be able to cut the detail I wanted with a 1/16th in bit, I would need to make the design almost 6 inches long.

When it came to picking the wood, I knew that size was by biggest priority. I also knew that plywood was probably not the choice because the layers can start to seperate as the carvey cuts (more on that later). I decided to risk the plywood option, and went with a nice 8 ply birch plywood. The higher quality plywood had a better chance of withstanding the delamination due to the Carvey. I choose an arbitrary cut depth of just under a quarter inch, because I figured that the deeper cut would creat a nice contrast (boy was I wrong). The first cut went alright, the 1/16th inch bit only broke off a couple of small detail bits and the rest cut very well! I had created a trace path in illustrator directly around the edge of the design in order to cut it out of the bigger piece of wood. This is where things went very wrong.

(a picture of the chaos that I caused)

The aggresive change to a 1/8th inch bit combined with how close the cutout line was to the design was a lethal combination for the integrity of my poor cut. Many large pieces quickly delaminated and so I stopped it because I knew that it was already unrecoverable. I consulted with Dr. Wettergreen and he confirmed two things. First, my intial design cut was way too deep, he showed me a few examples of how shallow of a cut would still grant enough of a difference in surface to display my wanted design. He also expressed that my cutout line should be set away from the design so that the cut with the 1/8th inch bit didn’t ruin the design cut.

Taking both of his suggestions I reworked my file in Illustrator and Easel and produced this copy:

(the reduced depth resulted in a beautiful, detailed cut)

I then switched the bits out and cut the cutout line. Unfortunately I had under estimated the distance I would need between the design and the line and as you can kind of see in the photo, I cut it too close in the top right edges of the design.

(my almost good enough copy)

I wasn’t quite satisfied yet, and so I adjusted my line and cut it one more time this time hoping for a near perfect result.

(while not perfect, obviously, this was my best cut yet and I was satisfied)

(my two final pieces side by side)

The final challenge was to paint the crests. I had had the idea of painting the cut down areas yellow and the raised areas black from the beginning, but was unsure of how to effectively pull that off. After considering several options and brainstorming with Dr. Wettergreen and Adulfo I decided to try and spray paint them yellow and then just dip them into black paint so as to just paint the raised surfaces. Suprisingly this worked very well and after just a few touch ups I was left with this final product.

 

(both my crests freshly painted)

(my better cut crest, it ended up with a less crisp paint just but I was still satisfied)

(this crest had a pretty solid paint job, I used the paint to fill in areas where the plywood had broken off)

Cost-

Machine Time on Carvey @$20/hr x 5 hours = $100

My labor time @$15/hr x 6 hours = $90

Materials (wood was salvaged scrap) Spray paint $5 + Black Paint $5 = $10

Total Cost= $200