For this week’s assignment, we are tasked with carving out a noun onto the wood. I chose to carve an elephant because of its importance to my home country, Thailand.

The first step was going on to thenounproject.com and search for Thai elephant. I selected this one because of its relative simplicity, something that is important because of the small size of the piece of wood I have (roughly 4″x 5″), and the size of the drill bits we have available (1/8″ and 1/16″).

I then downloaded the file in SVG format onto my computer, and uploaded it onto Easel to edit and print. In class we were taught to bring it into Adobe Illustrator to remove the text, but I tried to do it without because I didn’t have Adobe Illustrator on my laptop. When I uploaded on Easel, it automatically removed the text because Easel doesn’t support text. This meant that using Adobe Illustrator to remove the text was an unnecessary step. On Easel, I added an outline which I will cut through the wood to make it a nice rectangle in the end. For the elephant carving, I chose an 1/16″ drill bit to be able to carve out the fine details. For the rectangle outline, I used the longer 1/8″ to be able to cut through the entire piece of wood. This meant the carving had to be done in two phases. The elephant carving phase with the 1/16″ and then I had to replace the bit to a 1/8″ to cut the outline.

To do the carving for this project, we used the CARVEY by Inventibles. For the first attempt, I used an upcut bit because it sounded like the natural way to carve out wood efficiently. It turned out to leave a rough surface, and the bit broke half way through because of the curvature of the wood. (Picture below)

For my second attempt, I used a downcut bit to carve out the elephant for the smoother surface. I also clamped the wood the concave side down to reduce avoid the bit getting stuck and breaking. The end result was what I wanted: a smoothly carved out elephant on a rectangular piece of wood.

I could easily remove the rectangle from the excess wood, which was nice. I then sanded all the edges of the rectangle down so that it was no longer sharp. Over all, I am really pleased with the results, and repeated the cut again on a new piece of wood to get a second piece.

For the cost of the project, it took approximately 32 minutes per piece to carve out, so approximately 1:30 hours total for two whole pieces and most of a failed piece. Sanding all of the pieces down took a bit less than 30 minutes. This totals to 2 hours of labor. Assuming a labor cost of $10/hour, The total labor cost is $20. For the wood, I used approximately a foot worth of 1″ x 6″ wood which costs $6.88 for 8 feet at HomeDepot. Finally, sand paper costs $4.98, which gives us a total material and labor cost of $31.86. It should be noted that the there is sufficient wood and sand paper to do approximately 21 more pieces, and that the cost of the machine ($2,499, but can be used for 1000+ carving operations) and its operation (negligible electricity cost) is not included the the cost analysis dues to it being more difficult to be accurately estimated.

 

(Note: My object is placed in position 8.)