Boyz In The Wood
Regino Meriweather
We are thinking of carrying some hat blanks from time to time as we get appropriate wood, so called Chris Ramsey today for some info. Nice guy!! If you are interested let me know so I can contact you when I have some available.
Alex & Will Ross are the Two Tree Boyz. Together with their mom Elisabeth, they seal & sell green wood for turning or other wood crafts. Two Tree Boyz is currently working on building an inventory of sealed green wood for turning in block and small log form. Please contact us with size and type specifications if you are are interested in purchasing green wood for other types of wood craft.
I also have a bradford pear trunk. It is about 11 inch diameter, & you could get about 18 inches between the bottom of the trunk and the bottom of the 4 way crotch. I will be getting about a 3 ft trunk later this week.
I also have some 3 ft. long holly trunks. They are not straight & have some knots. I have learned that holly is very soft, but it is also very white so may work if you wanted to apply some sort of color to the piece. Sorry, but HM bought the best log for a basket illusion piece. ? Holly turns color pretty quickly though, so if you are interested you should get it soon.
See below for pics and sizes of blanks we have cut. Sizes are approximate as we are saw cutting. You will first see the face grain which is numbered, then there will be at least one more view of each piece. $20 each, black walnut
You made me create a wooden Game Boy shell. Yes, you made me do it. After I got myself a CNC machine a while back I just made a wooden Game Boy cartridge to get to know the machine, but social media wanted more. So, I made a Game Boy out of walnut wood.
You can see the process in the video without much explanation. If you want to learn about the toolpaths, my reasoning behind a few things, lessons learned and what you should avoid if you try this yourself, read this blog post instead and check out my design files on GitHub.
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Still, I love it and the CAM alternatives that seem to allow me to do similar things are very expensive1. So, I ended up using Blender CAM, which unfortunately means that many CNC users out there will cry before having to copy my models to their CAM to painstakingly recreate the toolpaths there.
In addition to the blend files I have also uploaded the gcode files that I actually used. They are for grbl-based machines, but even if your CNC uses a grbl controller it is a bad idea to just feed them to your machine. You will have to adapt it to the equipment that you actually use and I only added them as reference to review and compare.
Speaking of equipment-specific things: The feeds and cutting depths set in the blend files are for the weak spindle on my machine. If your spindle is stronger, you can quite certainly go a lot faster. But also keep in mind that the speeds in the blend files do not have any meaning. My spindle is not digitally controlled and since it has little torque at lower speeds I pretty much used it at its maximum of 10,000 rpm. You will have to adapt this to your machine and your bits.
Remember that I only got my CNC machine a few months ago, so do not expect comparative insights here. I will document what I use and try to explain a few things to people who have never used a CNC before. If you have a CNC and are just interested in the toolpaths, you can probably skip to the table with bits I used.
As a beginner I think that it is extremely capable for my needs, but its weak spot is its stock 400W spindle. Compared to stronger machines you will find that my toolpaths take much longer as I am doing significantly shallower cuts. Also the spindle is pretty much limited to its top speed of 10,000rpm as it seems to lack torque at lower settings. For the finer tools I would have wished for a higher speed and for some situations a reduced speed might have been beneficial as well. Luckily, this can be upgraded and I probably will do so in the future.
In the end, I mostly chose the 4030 V2 because of its rather small footprint. While others might consider this to be a disadvantage, it was the largest machine that I could fit into an enclosure onto my workbench. Since I do not have a proper wood workshop, the machine has to share a room with other hobbies in my basement, which means that I needed to address noise and dust, because CNC machines can deliver plenty of both.
Just a few warnings if you are thinking about picking up CNC as a hobby: Do not underestimate the noise and the amount of dust such a machine produces. The enclosure and dust extraction in my case ate up a huge part of my budget for a good reason. If you are in a dirty workshop far from other people you can ignore the enclosure, but please still think about your hearing and your lungs. I highly recommend to use a dust extraction system anyway and if you are doing this in a room that you spend a lot of time in or that you use for other things in general, a simple shop vacuum will not be enough. Fine saw dust will escape regular vacuums and you should really look into ones with a filter for dust class M.
Oh, and one more warning: I do not have a problem to leave my 3D printer unattended as long as I can check in once in a while through a webcam. The typical 3D printer accidents turn the machine into a PLA spaghetti factory, but it is still ok if you stop it 15 minutes later. The more dangerous typical fail state of a 3D printer is a cable fire especially on cheap printers like mine, but if you place your printer in an environment of low flammability there is plenty of time to recognize the problem before severe consequences.
This is different for a CNC machine! If things go south with a CNC machine, they go south fast! The typical CNC accident means driving a sharp piece of metal rotating at 10,000 rpm into something that was not supposed to receive that piece of metal. You can break a lot of stuff within seconds and that is the harmless case. Imagine running that 10,000 rpm metal stick into a dry piece of wood and leaving it there because of a failure or maybe because that wood got loose and now follows your machine. Remember those adventure movies where they make fire with a rotating stick? Do this with a 400W motor covered by saw dust and maybe with a dust extraction system sucking everything into the big container with even more sawdust.
The point is that you should not leave a running CNC machine, have a fire extinguisher nearby and make sure to have an easily accessible emergency stop that actually cuts power to your machine (in case of an enclose, put something like this on the outside). Here is a video to encourage you to take this serious.
While CNC machining often looks like you are just pushing a common drill bit to some wood, this is not what is happening at all (unless maybe you are actually drilling holes with your CNC). What looks like a drill bit usually is a milling bit (a so-called end mill). It is not designed to plunge vertically into the material (although in many cases it has to be able to do this, too), but to carve away material horizontally.
Another aspect is the shape of the tip of the bit. The most common one is the flat end mill, which is best suited to create a flat surface. However, if you want to create a curved 3D shape, this is not a good choice as it tends to create little steps that look similar to the layers of 3D printers. A ballnose bit with a circular tip can help as it can create a slope between one line to the next one.
Please keep in mind that I only got my first CNC router a few months ago, so these are mostly the first bits I ever used. I have no comparison to tell if they are good or bad, so take this as pure documentation and not as an endorsement.
The first step is to create the outside of the bottom half of the shell. For this you need a piece of wood with at least 160mm by 99.6mm and it should have a thickness of at least 23mm. Having a few more millimeters is highly recommended to allow for a few surfacing steps without becoming too thin.
And surfacing is exactly what we start with. The current surface will be the one visible on the back of the Game Boy shell. So, it should look nice and needs to be surfaced down to a clean even plane. Keep in mind that the remaining thickness needs to be at least 23mm even after possibly surfacing the other side too. The exact thickness does not matter yet, so just aim for a nice finish on this side.
This is my method of aligning the workpiece after flipping it. I drill small holes through to the backside that I can use to align it after turning it around. If you have a better way of doing this like a flip jig, a tool to measure distances along all three axes or even an additional axis, you can skip this toolpath.
I labeled this as a single path, but please notice that I have split it into two gcode files. The reason is that the working distance of my smallest bit is too short to go all the way through 23mm without hitting the wood with its wider 3mm shaft. So, there is a first step of drilling space for that shaft before creating the smaller and more precise holes on the backside.
If you use my solution, take note that zero is set to the corner of the Game Boy, so the hole in that corner will be drilled 5mm along negative x and y. So, when picking the start point to fit the 160mm by 99.6mm of the reference frame, keep in mind to offset zero by 5mm in both directions. This will be the zero for all subsequent steps, too.
Next I do a profile cut that does not go all the way through. It will eventually meet with a profile cut from the other side (if aligned properly). At this point it also gives room for a few upcoming toolpaths that enter and leave the outer rim of the Game Boy shell.
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