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Today's 3D carve project

SugarJ

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So I've been interested in 3D carving for a while, but had other little projects to take care of first. In fact, today before I started I had to redo my wiring to my spindle as my crimp connections sucked. Once that was over, I took the last bit of 12" shelving pine and decided to find something to carve. I found a $3 model on Etsy I liked, adjusted the size and went at it.

First pass was 45 minutes with a 1/4" endmill, roughing out the main area. I left .05" clearance during this pass, then started the long pass with a 1.5mm ball nose endmill, with a 15% stepover. Each pass only moved .24 mm on the Y axis. Here's a 20 second video showing you this process


So 4 hours later, you end up with this:

Hello Mando.jpg

Pine is soft and subject to tear out. I'm going to cut this out of the blank and do a bit of sanding, but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Happy enough I wouldn't mind cutting it again in some thicker oak or maple. I'm sure I lost some of the detail when I squeezed the z-axis down to fit into a 3/4" piece of wood.

Anyways, my wife and kids all thought it was cool so I thought I'd share.
 

sswilson

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Pretty cool!

So this process is "subtractive" as opposed to 3D printing which is "additive". You start off with Z at it's highest point and then work your way down? Does the bit stay at a fixed Z height for the full model and then move down to the next lowest height, or does it move up and down the Z axis at each grid position? (not sure how well I'm asking that... :) ).

When you did the "rough" cut, did it do any of the design elements and then return with a finer bit to clean the surface up, or is the rough cut just the basic outline of the frame and then it does all of the fine detail work with the finer bit?
 

SugarJ

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Yes, this is subtractive manufacturing. It starts at the top of the blank and works it's way down through the material. A CNC router is basically a milling machine with motors to move the head instead of hand cranks.

So for the roughing pass it takes a max of 3.175mm deep cut (1/2 the bit diameter of 6.35mm). It took 3 passes, rastered like the video (left to right then right to left passes) and leaving a blurry outline of the model. But it does move up and down so it doesn't cut through the model. The finishing pass just did it once over as it was taking a very thin pass (15% of 1.5mm or 0.23mm) and while in some spots it was removing a millimeter or two in depth of cut, it's barely hitting the edge of the bit. I probably could have skipped the roughing pass because this was pine and so soft, but I figured it was a good learning process.

Some of the fuzzy edges should sand sharper. And I will have to experiment with the raster options, I think there's one where it spirals in from the outside so it's always a climb cut rather than alternating a climb cut with a conventional cut. This is why the left side of the figure is fuzzier, I think.

Anyways, it was one of the funner afternoons I've spent in my garage lately.

Edit: It was almost 243,000 lines of G-code for the finishing cut. Each pass from one side to the other had about 160 different moves. And the finished cut is about letter paper size.
 

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