CNC Time- A Steamboat, CO Topography | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

I was excited for this weeks project because I have’t used the CNC much. As soon as I heard the option to make a topography of a mountain I knew I had to choose that one. My roommate Giulia lives in Steamboat Colorado and I thought a topography of her town would make a really nice gift. I started on the website TouchTerrain and found the perfect section of steamboat with a mix of mountains and the valley. When I first previewed the file, the mountains looked a little flat. To fix this I played around with the TouchTerrain parameters such as exaggerating the Z axis. This worked very well. Once I had a file I was happy with I followed the steps to download the trial version of V-Carve Pro on my laptop. Then I followed the steps to add toolpaths to my file starting first with a 1/4″ roughing bit and finishing with an 1/8″ ball head finishing bit. Everything was looking nice, so I saved the files and put them into the V-Carve Pro software on the OEDK computer. This is where I encountered my first issue. There was trouble transferring the files between the computers because my computer was not authorized. After talking with Danny and Fernando I found that I just needed to use the OEDK computer for the whole thing because of software issues. So, I quickly re-setup my file and added the same toolpaths and then I was good to go. Or so I thought. I clamped in my wood and initialized the machine, zeroing it and measuring the tools as I went, but when I was finally ready to hit cut, I realized I had oriented the piece 90 degrees in the wrong direction. I mixed up the x and y axis when typing in my dimensions and the part cut incorrectly. I tried to fix this by clamping the wood in the opposite direction, but the wood was too small and the clamps were too large to clamp securely. After about 3 total hours spent messing with it I decided to cut my losses and come back the next day. This time allowed me to brainstorm better clamping ideas (just orient the file in the opposite direction in V-Carve) and also gave me time to think about the part itself. I decided I wanted it to say STEAMBOAT and to have the letters emerging from the mountains. Benji already had Blender open and offered to write steamboat for me, so I sent him my mountain file and he merged the two shapes. Then I did the same process as before with the file with the words. This time I clamped the wood in the correct orientation and hoped all would work out. I setup the machine and loaded the 1/4″ roughing bit and…….. It all worked out! The roughing pass looked nice and I simply changed the tool to the 1/8″ ball head tool and started up the next file. And it looked beautiful! The mountains were super smooth and the letters turned out great. There was slight chipping on the “O” of Steamboat, but luckily the piece didn’t come all the way off and a dot of wood glue fixed it right up. I posted processed by using the miter saw to chop of the excess wood, sanding the edges, and adding a coat of oil to make the wood grain pop. I wanted the letters to stand out even more so I took the piece home and gave the tops of them a coat of black paint. All in all I am very proud of this project. I feel like I could have made the letters a bit bigger and used a smaller tool to make the letters even sharper, but for now I was really impressed at the level of detail the 1/8″ tool achieved.