Today's Project

[John TenEyck]

Any Bill's fans out there? Plenty of them around me.



Someone else is doing the epoxy. I just cut the recesses.

John

[Jim Becker]

Someone else is doing the epoxy. I just cut the recesses.

John

I've done a lot of that for a guy over the past few years...he's really good at resin inlay, but not interested in setting up a more formal shop to do the CNC stuff himself. One thing I've enjoyed with working with this fellow is that he gives me nearly complete artistic license and to-date, there's never been a conflict.

That looks really nice, John. (Do be careful with licensed art...but you know that already)

[John TenEyck]

Thanks Jim. I figure I'm fine with the copyright laws as long as I'm not selling these things on-line, at a craft show, advertising, etc. A guy asked, I did it.

I'm interested in why that visible repetitive stripe is there. The 1/4" upcut end mill was cutting in an offset pattern with a climb cut. I can't feel any difference to the wood, but I can sure see those stripes. Any thoughts? They won't show once the epoxy is poured, thankfully.

John

[Jim Becker]

The pattern you "see" is pretty normal in my experience and yes, since it's going to be filled/covered by resin, no big deal. If you start doing this frequently, you'll want to invest in some really tiny end-mills so you have the opportunity to keep tight corners and also deal better with fine lines in artwork you will invariably be vectorizing or "fixing" if it's already vectors. My friend has a Shutterstock subscription that a lot of the art work we use comes from and a lot of the graphics were made in Adobe Illustrator by folks who don't use CNC or similar to cut things...so many overlaps and other anomalies to clean up! I bought a bunch of inexpensive 1.5mm and 1mm tooling to help with the finer lines after using larger tool(s) to clear larger spaces.

[Alex Zeller]

I did the Pats logo the same way but instead of doing epoxy I got died maple skateboard veneers. I thought I took a picture of it but I can't find it. I do have a test piece I made out of scrap wood hanging up in the basement. What I did was glued the veneer to some scrap wood then cut the out the largest part of the logo (the white outer part). Then I used the bandsaw to slice it off and then used epoxy to glue it to the outer piece. Then repeated it with the next largest parts (the blue and red parts) of the logo then the star and face (I did the face in white because I couldn't find a silver veneer). The slightly rough cut from the bandsaw gave the epoxy plenty to glue to. Once it was all done there was plenty of extra epoxy but I just used a surfacing bit to remove it. Just thought I would throw it out there just in case you want to try something different than epoxy.
pats 1.jpg

[John TenEyck]

Thanks for taking the time to post that, Alex. Nice work. Inlays are one of the things I'm pursuing. It's almost limitless what you can do with a CNC and some imagination.

John

[John TenEyck]

Thanks Jim. It's probably hard to see but I ran a profile cut with a 1/8" EM to sharpen the edges where needed, after the pocket cut. I regularly use 1/16" EM with parts like for the clock I recently posted. Of course, you have to go slower with these small bits but holding the workpiece is almost trivial because they exert such low force on it.

John

[Robert Maloney]

Looks good John. Go BILLS!!

[Alex Zeller]

I've been using Kyocera 1/16" EM from ebay. They work great for cleaning up the corners and for $20 for 5 US made bits how can you go wrong.