This project had us learning about CNC milling, using the Carvey. Originally, I wanted to carve a stylized tree found on The Noun Project.When I first downloaded the tree, I deleted some of the smaller circles to save some time on the cut. Then I imported it into Easel by Inventables to ensure that it would fit on the piece of wood that I chose. The wood was 3.5”x4”x.75”. I also made sure to ungroup the leaves from the trunk so that I could cut them at different depths. I set it in Easel so that the smallest leaves would be deepest, the bigger leaves at a smaller depth, and the trunk at the shallowest depth. Then I logged in to Easel on the computer connected to the Carvey and realized I had forgotten to account for the red clamp, that meant I had to scale everything down, which made the branches too thin to be cut for a 1/16” bit. I didn’t want to go to a smaller bit because then the cut would take too long.

So, I decided the tree was too complex and went to another design. This time I looked for a more simple potted plant. I took some time to edit the original file so that I could ungroup the plant from the put and cut them at different depths. Then I imported the file into Easel, made a copy of the file, and deleted the pot and the plant in the different copies. That way, I could cut the two parts with different sized bits to make the process faster. Before setting up the carve, I stained the wood so that the cut area would have more contrast from the uncut area. Then I set up the carve!  The whole thing took about 10 minutes, 5 minutes with each bit. To cut both of them, the process took 20 minutes. I used a 1/16” upcut 2 flute fishtail for the plant part and the same bit but 1/8” for the pot. The pot depth was .25”, and the plant depth was .125”. After finishing the cuts, I sanded both pieces with 3 grits of sandpaper. I’m not sure exactly was the grit was because I couldn’t find the numbers on the paper. I started with the coarsest sandpaper and ended with the finest. The sandpaper took off some of the stain on the edges, but I like how it frames the piece.  Altogether the process took me about 2.5 hours, since I spent a lot of time fixing the files in Illustrator and started over once. Assuming time on the Carvey costs about $10, a jar of stain costs about $10, the wood costs about $10 together, and I pay myself $10 an hour, the total cost comes out to be about $55.