My wife's birthday present

Projects
1

My wife’s birthday is coming up and she’s a huge star wars fan. There was a han solo in carbonite stl bouncing around the internet and I grabbed hold of that and gave it a shot as my first ever carve.

I used Carveco Maker to handle the CAM of the relief, and set the cut with a 1/4" roughing tool and then a 1/16" relief carve tool (I used Amana 46315-K for roughing and Amana 46282-K ball nose for the finishing carve.)

The project started by hogging out the excess wood from the top of the walnut. It was a little sad seeing the walnut go but I was in-it-to-win-it, so-to-speak.

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Here’s a pic of the amana 1/16" ball-nose bit carving the x-motion part of the relief

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Here’s a pic after the y-motion part of the relief was completed

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I used walrus oil cutting board oil because it’s what I had on hand, and I know it brings out the dark color of walnut quite well:

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And finally, here’s the condition of the piece after its had a couple days to dry off after the oiling.

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Overall, I’m sure I could do this piece on a smaller device; amusingly, a few people have asked “could you make a coffee table with this and a clear resin top?” With the 5x10 I’m sure I could! The question is whether I’d want to run afoul of Lucasfilm in the process…

My wife loves it and can’t wait to hang it in her office!

6 Likes
2

Well that’s just plain killer!!!
A riff on this theme could be to mill it out of thick clear acrylic, so the final frosted look appears icy…or again clear acrylic then drown it in clear light blue epoxy, to make flat top, so the deeper areas would be darker blue and highest areas like face and hands would be lightest blue, you know?
Anyway, what you’ve done is perfect really - great work!
Ryan

1 Like
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Nice work. I have a question for you. Using the 16th inch bit, how large was your stepover distance between cuts? I’m asking because I’ve done a lot of this type of work and have never even thought of cutting in both the x and y directions. I use one or the other and with a .01" stepover it comes out great every time with the one cut.

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Awesome work! My kids would love that!

1 Like
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I believe the stepover was 50%, or 0.03125". I can’t validate because I didn’t save the project file :scream:

I use Carveco and Carveco has the option to do X and Y relief passes.

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Cool project. Been looking for some ideas for Christmas and this fits the build for a couple people I know. I am now in the process of making a couple of these. Thanks for sharing.

2 Likes