The Dragon Advances | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

The Dragon is Discovered

For my final ENGI 210 Project on the CNC machine, I decide to carve out a Blackflame Dragon from one of my favorite books, Blackflame by Will Wight. I find my dragon on the noun project.

He has a fairly complex geometry, and Easel thinks it will take about four hours to cut when I import the svg directly from the noun project.

The Dragon is Modified

I use the shapebuilder in Illustrator to simplify my toolpath, reducing the time needed to cut the interior down to 1.5 hrs and the time needed to cut out the outline to 1.5 hrs as well. The dragon also has fin type things around his head, and I decide to make those cut deeper than the rest of his outline to give him some depth (and meet the two depth requirement). After correctly sizing the dragons head on Easel, I copy the shapepath onto another art board and delete the parts of the path inside of the outline. By cutting outside the shape path for this new outlining toolpath I will be able to cut out my dragon. Now I just have to actually cut my dragon on the machine!

The Dragon is Born

I use a 3.5 in x 3.5 in piece of red oak and a 1/16 in fishtail spiral bit. My first cut I choose a rough pass and it cuts weird dots everywhere instead of what I want.

D14

I don’t move the wood and try again with a detailed cut. This works much better.

I use an upcut which does make the surface rather rough, so I will have to fix that in post-processing. I also missed the option to turn off tabs for both of my cuts, so the dragons are still attached to their borders.

The Dragon is Finished

I use the cutting tool on the Dremel to cut through the tabs and free my dragons.

I try to use the dremel sanding tool, but I’m afraid of damaging my wood. I sand the dragon by hand with 400 grit sandpaper instead.

There are some annoying fragments in the inner geometry I need to remove as well. I spray-paint the fronts and backs of both dragons black, two coats, with sanding between.

I don’t paint the sides because I like how it looks as is.

There’s a heavy dusting of black paint along the sides from spray painting the front and the back. It gives the wood an aged, weathered, or slightly burned look that I really like. Finally, I paint the dragons’ eyes red. The paint brush is too big to only paint the eyes, so I use a paper towel. There’s still some slight red on the outer eye. but it mixes with the black nicely. Which is nice, because I’m colorblind and didn’t notice it until I got home.