Sort of bittersweet that this is our last individual project of the semester. I’m happy to hopefully not have too many more long hours spent in the OEDK (for this class) but sad that the fun is ending! Mistakes won’t be free any more 🙁

Anyways, this week we dove further into learning about CNC machining wood. As expected, I chose a design surrounding dogs. Can’t break the streak this late.

Originally, I was going to use the Shapeoko to create an adorable little realistic 3D paw print:

Ravi absolutely crushed it with his topographies, so I recruited him for assistance helping me set up my first cut. With his help, I was able to set up what looked to be a good toolpath for this cut using the vcarve software on the desktop.

This mostly did really well, but the wood piece started moving right before the whole part was finished, naturally, so I stopped the cut prematurely to avoid having any massive fails (or breaking anything). The paw mostly cut out, but I had to remove the final layer of wood on my own in order to get my paw completely out.

I was only able to complete this one paw in the time that I had the machine booked for, and was pretty sad to see that this machine was booked almost completely up until submissions were due. So, I decided to take a small 2 hour timeslot on the Nomad CNC machine and pray that I could get two purrfect (im so sorry) paws cut in this time. I chose a more simple design for this machine, and made sure I could fit both of my pieces on one cut of wood since I had basically already wasted one – I didn’t want to use too much of the classes wood.

I set these up pretty quickly in the carbide create and got them running. So quickly that I did not think to stop and take pictures 🙂 The program is pretty foolproof, so it took all of about 5 minutes to set up, initialize, probe, and start running my cut. 4 of those minutes were spent making sure the wood was so secured down to the cut plate that I may have needed a large man to rip it off. besides the point.

These cuts ran extremely smoothly the first go, fortunately, and the only thing I would do differently with this cut was adjust the tabs to be smaller than recommended, because my paws were fairly difficult to get out despite only having three tabs. But hey, they didn’t move out of place.

From here all that was left was helping friends and post processing my pieces, which I thought I had such a cute idea for… but is very ugly if you don’t understand *the vision*. My plan was to make the paws sort of the same color scheme as my pup, Febe, who is a dark grey/brown/black merle and is always wearing pink. I thought I would apply a light coat of dark stain on the perimeter of the paw, but apply extra coats to make the actual paw pads blacker. Then, I would spray paint the back and the sides pink to match what she always wears.

Technically, I did just that. May have been a cute idea but was definitely a poor design choice. So, please have a little mercy before going straight to thinking my paws are ugly. Know there was good intention.

Here is the cost analysis for the paws that only I would ever buy:

Cost Analysis for CNC Paws
Material	Cost	Amount	Quantity Needed	Total Cost
Wooden Planks	$3	8ft	1ft	$0.42
Facilities	$250	31 Days	4hrs	$1.34
Protoyping Engineer	$38	1 hr	.5 hr	$19
CNC Machinist	$20	1 hr	2 hr	$40
Black Stain	$9	.5 pint	2 oz	$2
Spray Paint	$6	12 oz	2 oz	$0.75
Quality Control	$41	1 hr	.5 hr	$5.13
Total Cost				$68.88