Hi all!
Here’s one of my recent projects off the Avid.
A salad set – fork and spoon. A new design I did similar to some of my older utensil designs, but with a more flat shape, designed in Blender. I did a new inlay design for this project; a hibiscus flower. It’s a curved inlay, using VCarve’s “project to model” option, and an inverse of the shape for the plug.
I made directions & plans for how to make them, in case anyone wants to give it a go. I’m also happy to answer questions in case anyone else wants to do something similar for their own designs.
I made 6 sets, and sold one so far. I’m hoping to take them to a craft fair at some point! (I also sell them on my website…but I rarely get physical sales from there).
Darn @corbin, your videos always hit a home run! Thank you. I don’t work with wood much and you taught me a couple new things here. Funny that I say that as I was out in the garage making wooden handles for a project I’ll share here next week or so… These are cut from Teak scraps and I haven’t finish-sanded or added polyurethane to them, so I’ll definitely consider going back and doing the water soak to raise the grain before finish sanding. Thanks man…! I cut these a few weekends back, (teak scraps), but I’ve been working on the steel parts of the assembly these are attached to in the past couple weekends so just haven’t had time to finish the wood working portions… Also wish I had thought of the oscillating saw to free these, as, I left a few dog-bites in some these releasing the tabs with the vertical band saw, which you can see in the bottom part in the last photo…
Thank you for continuing to post truly inspiring projects! I hope everyone, whether doing simple things or complex, will follow your great example and share what they are working on!
Awesome @da-kengineer-meister - those look great! Yeah, I learned that “raising the grain” is really helpful. Be careful with any wood that has a lot of tannins in it (cherry, redwood, and some oaks) - any metal bits will cause black staining as the wood dries out. I’ve been bitten by this a few times, even when using clean water and being extra careful.
Those multi-tool saws are super handy for remodeling projects…I don’t know what I’d do without it!
@NLE Thanks Pete! Check out this screen shot of how I setup the plug in VCarve. The model is set to “subtract” from the Zero Plane to generate the inverse model for the plug. Check out the tool paths on the right; just a normal roughing and finishing path to generate the shape, limited to where the VCarve will be. Then a typical VCarve - using two different depths, and an extra “clear” depth for better fit. This answer your question?
I greatly appreciated your tip on the blue painters tape before you do the V-carve. I now use that on fine inlay work for my cutting boards and it has solved my chipping problem on the fine inlays as well.
Thanks for your tip on the metal dowel pins. I have a “Shame box” full of broken bits from all my mistakes over the years. Finally can put those 6mm bit pieces to good use.
Hi Corbyn, I fully understand and I feel the same about my designs. Here in Africa we have different traditional design for wood utensils. I was only interested in your parameter settings.
What settings are you needing to know? The start depth and final depth really have to be determined by experimentation, but you can deterministically change them based on a problem. I tell people this:
Moving the Start
Depth up or down will make the fit more loose or more tight. You may have to experiment
to find out what works best for your particular CNC machine and setup! Too loose happens
when the plug bottoms out, and you have to lower the start depth. Too tight generally
doesn’t show up as an issue until you cut the piece in half, and it will show a gap at the
bottom.
