For the CNC noun assignment, I decided to make drink coasters with a ship’s helm on them. First I found a helm icon from the noun project. I brought that into Illustrator to create my shape file. 

Once I knew the size of the parts, I prepared the wood. I had some spare wood at home that was about 7.25” wide and 0.75” thick, so I cut four 4” pieces. I wanted to have four pieces to have a couple of spares. Best case scenario, all of my spares would come out great and I’d have a set of four coasters (spoiler: I do not have four coasters). (The markings here are just denoting which of the long ends was most square to the short ones, and then the plank dimensions).

Next, in the Carbide Create software, I input the wood piece dimensions and set the helm to be pocketed out, and the outer circle to a contour.

Then- cut! The first piece turned out great. It didn’t cut the contour all the way through, and there was a bit too much thickness left to pop the parts out- about 0.030” based on measuring the contour depth. I wasn’t worried about this, so I didn’t adjust the cut depth.

The second part was going great until about halfway through the contour cut. Then, the part came up off of the base and moved, causing the cut to move into the helm shape.

For the remaining two pieces I made sure to stick my parts to the board extra firmly, and had no issues! Three parts came out as good- I was happy to have a spare for post-processing. 

I found the helm shape a little hard to read. So I thought when I post process, I should make the helm one color (gold), and the remainder another (dark wood stain). So, I started by spray painting the tops gold, being sure to cover the floors and walls of the helm pockets.

Next, I wanted to remove the coasters from the surrounding wood plank. The connective thickness was thin, but still too thick to easily pop the parts out. So, I clamped the parts upside down and used the orbital sander to sand down the back until it was easy to pop the parts out.

They still had a bit of the connective thickness around the edges, so I used a file to remove them.

At this point, I used the orbital sander again, this time to remove the gold spray paint from the top of the part, leaving gold only in the helm pockets. I also sanded all of the outside surfaces to smooth them out.

Then, I stained the parts. I used a dark wood stain, and applied with Q-tips for the top surface, and a small sponge brush for the other surfaces.

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	1×4 Board	$6.98/8ft	Home Depot	16in	$1.16
	Spraypaint	$10.48 /11oz	Home Depot	~ 1oz	$0.95
	Stain	$12.98 /quart	Home Depot	< 1oz	$0.41
Labor	CNC Operator	$24/hr	Zip Recruiter	2hr	$48
	Prototyping Engineer	$38/hr	Zip Recruiter	2hr	$76
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	$250/mo	Fin Models Lab	2hr	$3.13
	Quality Control	$20.56	indeed.com	.25hr	$5.14
TOTAL					$134.79