Hello again! This week brings one of the final assignments: carving a noun into wood using a CNC router. To start this project off, I first had to choose which noun from the website “The Noun Project” I wanted to create. After much searching, I finally decided to use the noun “mountain”. There were many different versions of this noun available on the website, But I chose the one pictured in Figure 1 because I liked the circle border around the image, and I thought adding the clouds was a nice touch.
Figure 1: The selected mountain design
Once the design was selected, I began setting up the Carvey (a CNC router at the OEDK) to cut this design in some blocks of wood Dr. Wettergreen provided. The blocks of wood were relatively small, around 2.5″ x 3″ in the x-y plane, so the mountain design needed to be downsized such that it would successfully fit on the pieces. Scaling down meant that I needed to use a smaller bit in the router to make sure that the machine could accurately cut all of the thin lines, so I used a 1/16″ bit to cut. I also set the program to only cut 1/4″ into the wood to maintain a relatively short cut time (around 9 minutes) while still adequately showing the design. This cut design can be seen in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: One freshly cut wood block
Once my pieces were cut, I was ready to move on to post processing. In prior assignments, when post processing wood, I only use one finishing process on the entire piece. For this project, I wanted to try something different. To do this, I decided to stain the cut out mountains using a darker wood stain, leave the sky area light, and use a different finish for the rest of the wood block outside of the design. In prepping the pieces of wood, I used a medium to high grit sandpaper on each of the surfaces. To start off the staining process, I used masking tape to outline the mountain areas, and then used small amounts of a gel stain and a rag to carefully apply the stain onto the mountains. I wiped the stain off of the wood right away as I wanted to avoid it getting to any other part of the wood. This taped up piece of wood can be seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Applying the mountain stain
Once this stain had been wiped away, I carefully removed the masking tape, and found some polyurethane and a foam brush to begin the next step: finishing the rest of the wood block outside of the cut design. For this part, I didn’t have to use any tape, but instead just carefully outlined the circle of the design with the foam brush, and from there was able to cover the rest of the piece in a thin layer of polyurethane. When setting it up to dry, I didn’t want any of the wet surfaces touching the table, which was hard to do considering all of the surfaces were wet surfaces. However, it just so happened that the tops of the gumball containers used in last project perfectly fit inside of the circle outline on the wooden parts. So, I set up the pieces such that they were “suspended” by the gumball top piece, and were left to dry like that. Once fully dried, I lightly sanded all of the surfaces and was left with my final pieces, which can be seen in Figure 4.
Figure 4: My finished pieces!
Through this assignment, I was able to refresh my memory on how to use the Carvey (which I had used only once before) and was able to play round with some different post processing techniques. I am very satisfied with the final products, and am very excited to see what my classmates have created!
Lastly, I will do a quick cost analysis. Regarding labor costs, I worked for 1.5 hours, and at $20/hr, labor costs total $30. As for material costs, I used about two 2.75″ x 3″ pieeces of 3/4″ plywood, and a 4 ft. x 8 ft. piece can be purchased form Home depot for $34.98, so I only used ~$0.13 worth of wood. The amount of polyurethane and stain used probably totals around $4, and the sandpaper around $2. This comes to a total of #36.13 for two pieces, or $18.07 for one piece.
