It’s nearly over, guys. One last project before the final and that’s it. End of the semester. No more projects. How has time flown this fast? It seemed like only yesterday we were building a box. But now’s not the time to dwell on the past. I have a project to blog about. This week’s project was a rather nice one. Find a picture you like, then carve it into wood using one of the CNC mills, specifically the Carvey or the X-Carve. Post-process to your liking. Seems pretty standard.

First, the image. Dr. Wettergreen recommended that we use an image from The Noun Project, which has an image for everything from zippers to Michael Jackson. For this project I settled for something simple like this picture of a solar system I found under ‘galaxy.’ I also considered this picture of Pikachu from Pokemon, but the small details and slender lines repelled me.

Next step: processing the images. Easel, the program used to operate the Carvey, cannot take the downloaded image immediately because it contains text. A quick trip to Illustrator fixes that. Once in Easel, the picture is transformed into g-code which I can manipulate with the interface.

Learning from multiple projects in the past, I decide to test the code on a test piece first. My Easel code looked like this. The test piece was a 5.9″x2.5″ piece of red oak, but the Easel settings did not have that specific material. Compared to the other wood we had available, this seemed like a harder, denser wood, so I choose Hard Maple as the closest material. As for the drill bit, we did have 1/32″ downcut available, but since this piece had very little important details I reasoned a 1/16″ gets the job done. Finally, the cut depth is 1/8″ because it looked nice and was pretty quick to carve.

With the code ready, I prayed to the gods above and pressed ‘Carve.’ Apparently Cavey was in a good mood that day because my carve went without a hitch. Once or twice I paused to remove the sawdust, but nothing else. After that was done,  I took a lunch break then sanded down the edges to give it a smooth look.

I could have stopped there, but Dr. Wettergreen also provided us with some unprocessed raw wood that looks beautiful. I had to carve with that. After modifying my code to accomodate for the weird shape and size of the wood (link here), I proceeded to carve the wood. The most notable difference in the code is that the depth of the carve doubled. This is because the wood I choose had an uneven face, so I would have to sand it down. Increasing the carve depth would prevent the cut from looking too shallow.

Thankfully, the carve went as expected. After spending half an hour removing the sawdust (it clumps together at the bottom of the carve enough to resist the vacuum), I then spent an hour sanding the face on the bet sander. Overall, I’m happy with the results and would definitely hang it on my wall.