For this project, I decided to go H.A.M. because I kinda slacked off on the last one… plus it’s woodworking which I like a lot. To start off, I looked through the old submissions from last year and really liked the one with the pie that had been stained before going through the CNC machine to reveal the lighter interior, so I wanted to replicate that. I first tested the carve, and had a bit of trouble getting the width and bit right, but once I settled on 1/16th downcut it came out perfect. Then I grabbed three different types of wood and headed downstairs to test the stains I wanted to use on them. Each piece got three different stains (gunstock, mahogany, and beeswax) so that I could directly compare all the color combinations. This is shown below, with the stains in the order left to right: gunstock, mahogany, beeswax.

After testing all of them, I settled on what I *think* is cedar and mahogany, the middle stripe on the far right. I liked this the best, but it wasn’t quite perfect, I wish there had been another stain that I could check out. The mahogany was dark however, so I anticipated that it would look nice in contrast to the lighter inner wood that the CNC was about to reveal. It’s worth mentioning that I tested the carve and then decided on color because I didn’t want to stain a piece of wood only to throw it away when the carve messed it up.
Pictured here is the cedar block with the mahogany stain. I like how it brought out the grain and would provide good contrast once cut. After staining I took the block to the Carvey and CNC’d in my shape, a bicycle with heart wheels. I chose this image because I love bikes, so it worked out well. The carve went well, and by switching to the 1/16th bit, I was able to do a double outline as opposed to fill, which adds nice detail and looks great. This carve is shown below on the block of wood. In order to get the size that I wanted I had to offset the icon from the center of the block so that Carvey wouldn’t hit it’s guide clamp, so that required me to trim excess wood from two sides to make the image centered on the final piece of wood. To trim the wood, I first took the block to the small saw downstairs, but it got stuck and I realized that while my block was skinny, it was too thick for this saw. I then took it to the wood shop where a lab assistant helped me cut it down. She was kind of flying by the seat of her pants and told me she didn’t need to clamp the piece down while using the rotary chopping saw and on the second cut the piece got caught on a knot, flew out of her hands, and got ripped up pretty bad. I was frustrated, but so it goes. Here we can see where a corner got ripped out by the saw. This was decidedly unattractive, so I decided to sand the heck out of it and make it rounded on the bottom to remove this defect. I sanded this for about 20 minutes on the belt sander and took it from square edges to the rounded profile shown below. After I was happy with the sanding, I sealed the bottom with beeswax because I like that color. Interestingly enough, after I CNC’d the piece I used the air compressor to remove the sawdust from the inside of the carved sections, and this ended up actually blowing stain OUT of the piece back onto the surface, so there are small darker brown spots from that.Here is the final product! With $160 in labor costs, $40 to use tools, and $3 of wood and $10 of wood stains, this came out to $213, which is pretty steep!!