I've had my 1F for about 3 weeks now. It's been a hoot getting to know it. It's fascinating, frustrating and entertaining, too, and I think at some point, it will be productive. So far I've used it to make a few accessories for the CNC as well as for a couple of projects. After I got the spoilboard flattened, I made some simple clamps.




Then I made a finger jointed drawer for the CNC cabinet. I learned quite a bit on this on how to use the Allowance Offset to get the fingers to mesh properly. The dog ears are needed to get the two parts to mate properly when cutting them flat. That's one reason I want to incorporate a vertical material orientation in the future; so I can cut finger joints and dovetails w/o the dog ears. This was fine for a shop cabinet however.



Working on a "real" project, I made some large finger joint templates from MDF for a bench I was building.



I used those with a top bearing mortising router bit to cut out the bulk of the slots in the legs and seat of this bench. I cut out the rest of the waste with a handsaw and and then used a bottom bearing flush cutting router bit from the other side to remove the residual waste. The parts fit so tight that I had to do some hand paring to loosen them up some, but it was far easier than cutting them all by hand.


I used to sign my pieces by hand, but now that I have the CNC I decided to create a signature inlay. This is 3.5 x 1.75". I made a router template to go with it and used it to inlay one in the bottom of this bench.



I can do better with the signature inlay, but this was OK for a start.

A couple of days ago I tried my hand at creating a VCarve inlay of a Celtic knot. It's 5.5" and not perfect, but close, and was pretty easy to do, far easier than trying something like this by hand. I have no clue how I would do that.



Every day I think of something new I'd like to try. I'm about to try tiling in the next few days. Should be fun.

John