CNC – fully functional

I finally brought all the pieces together today and cut my first “real” project on the CNC machine.

To this point, I was hamstrung by a variety of startup costs, both financial and temporal.

I wanted to really see how accurate the CNC machine could get, so I picked an easy-to-draw, but time-consuming-to-cut piece, with raised lettering and raised graphics.

The piece is about 12″ x 4″, and came out pretty nicely, if I do say so myself:

…and here it is, ready for Christmas delivery! Kristi did the paint-and-bling job. Very cool looking. She says that the raised letters are more difficult to pull off than the recessed ones, but I think the results are nothing short of spectacular.

One down, three to go. (edit: Just 2 signs this Christmas. More on the way as time permits!)

I might re-cut this out of solid wood, too. It would work well on a two-by-four. The sanding of all those little corners is the trickiest part.
This also took almost 2.5 hours of machine time to cut. The machine is… slow. 🙂

I was cutting 1/8″ deep at a time. I could probably go 1/4″. That would speed things considerably. I could probably push the machine to 45ipm instead of 30, also.
And of course, engraving this instead of pocketing it would have meant the job would have been done in minutes instead of hours; that’s a lot of material to remove.

Very, very fun. I should have cut this thing out months ago; I procrastinated. Simple as that. I bought the software licenses in early October, and had the graphics done before that.

Welcome to the world, CNC machine. You’ve earned your first stripe.