For my CNC project, I chose to recreate a small portion of the mountains around Butte Meadows, near Lassen National Forest in California. I’ll admit that they aren’t the most dramatic, but I wanted to use them in this project because I grew up camping with my family in the area, and my dad went camping there as a kid too, so it’s a really meaningful location.

First, I had to find elevation data for the area. Since I wanted to zoom in pretty close to the area, I had to find a high resolution DEM, so I ended up getting the data directly from the USGS website. Then, to crop it to the area I wanted, I used QGIS. Finally, I used a QGIS plugin to convert the GeoTIFF file to an STL, and I was ready to set up my cut in VCarve.

I wanted to make the final pieces as big as I could to help with the resolution of the mountains, so I chose one of the biggest pieces from the provided wood. I was able to cut two 3×3″ squares out of this one piece, but it was a pretty tight fit. For my roughing pass, I used a 1/4″ end mill to try to make the cut as fast as I could. Next, I did a finishing pass with a 1/16″ ballnose bit to get as much detail as possible. My final two cuts were profile cuts with a 1/8″ end mill that went around each square to cut them out; unfortunately, I couldn’t use the 1/4″ end mill for these because they were too close to each other and to the edges of the wood. When I previewed these cuts in VCarve, it told me they would take over 8 hours total, but luckily, VCarve overestimated this, and they only ended up taking about 6 hours when I loaded them in Carbide Motion (still a little crazy, but definitely an improvement).

With my toolpaths done, I could now start cutting it on the CNC. Because of the size of the wood, securing it was kind of awkward, but I ended up getting it relatively secure using a combination of double-sided tape and clamps.

I had to tighten the clamps a bit more after starting because the wood was moving slightly, but after that I had no problems for my roughing cuts and finishing cuts. After watching over the Shapeoko for a little over 4 hours, I had the detail of the mountains done and ready for the profile cuts. I had a little bit of trouble with the piece moving during the profile cut and it actually came loose very briefly, but luckily, it didn’t do any damage to the mountains and I was able to get everything realigned. To be safe, I ended up just adding some duct tape over the side that wasn’t being cut to hold the piece down.

I left a very thin layer of wood at the bottom of the board so I wouldn’t cut into the boards on the Shapeoko, so I carefully broke this layer to remove the sides and separate the two squares. Then, I used the belt sander to smooth the sides and bottom of each piece. There were a lot of sort of fuzzy wood pieces left over on the mountains themselves, but I couldn’t sand these without damaging the mountains, so I used one of the softer wire brushes to remove them. Finally, I sanded the sides and bottom again with a finer grit sandpaper to make them smoother before adding a finish to the wood. I chose to use one coat of danish oil to finish the pieces. While I was a little nervous about how dark it would be, I really like how it came out: I feel like the darker finish made the shadows a lot more dramatic and made the mountains more visible despite their relatively small size.

Overall, I am really happy with how these mountains came out! I wasn’t familiar with the CNC before this project and the final, so there was a bit of a learning curve with a more complicated cut like this, but I enjoyed it. If I did this again, I think I would consider using a different piece of wood. The wood had a surface crack before I started cutting, and although I was able to avoid it, after my finishing cut was done I discovered a deeper crack in one of the pieces that I hadn’t been able to see before the wood was cut. Also, I think it would have helped a lot to run the board through the planer before using the CNC, as I had to do a lot more sanding than I would’ve liked to to get the bottom smooth due to damage on the surface of the wood.

Cost estimate:

• 2×4 (~6.5″): $2
• Danish oil: very small amount, negligible
• ~7 use of CNC machine at $20/hr: $140
• 10 hours labor at $10/hour: $100

Total: $242 (pricey ;-;)