[View with PicLens]

I carved this Mayan Calendar in 1/4 inch thick Corian (brand) solid surface material. The diameter of the circle is 7-3/4 inches. The last picture was created within Vectric Aspire V2 to illustrate how the finished carving would look. I will say, no difference.

Tooling was a solid 1/4 inch  60 degree V-bit at 10, 600 RPM, feed was 50 IPM cut with 30 IPM plunge. Minimum Z depth was set to -0.20 inches but it looks like it didn’t get there. The material is 0.250 inches thick.  Cut time was 1 Hour 35 minutes. That’s the carving details for the fellow carvers out there.

It can be used for a wall hanging or perhaps as a table hot pad. Corian can’t take high heat but a hot dish would be fine.

The primary reason I made this piece was to display and test the accuracy of the HB2 carving machine I built. This is a smaller version of the first carving I made on this machine.  The HB2 machine is mostly a PDJ design, but I made changes and details (like the spindle and stepper heat sinks) to suit myself. A picture of my machine can be seen at the bottom of the PDJ home page.

Some of the calendar pictures are close duplicates, but I couldn’t decide which ones not to show. There is still some Corian material dust (the white looking deposits) in the carving and it takes a lot of work to clean it all out. The close up photography brings all those details out but it looks much better with normal hand viewing. The detail is fantastic as many of the surface lines drop right down into the deeper areas. A nice looking project.

The carving is only one part of a fully finished piece. The software design is a good sized part of the effort. The carving is interesting to watch but it is the amount of time in the detail finishing that would make this a piece of art. If this was a piece for sale, I would detail the finish, but time is money. This piece has a flaw, a little slip off the right edge – so in my book, this is as much time as I need to spend on this example.

Not quite perfect but I hope you like what you see. I love the detail.

Shown here is a relief carving in a 4″ x 4″ bone color Corian tile that is 1/4″ thick. The subject is the Zodiac twins, Gemini.  The tile was cut with a 1/16″ rotary cutter. One pass would have been sufficient, but I ran a second pass 90 degrees to the first. The second pass did very little except clip a few ridges here and there.

This is the same material I use for Lithophanes. This is not a Lithophane but it can be back lighted for an interesting effect.

I spent some time with Adobe Lightroom to highlight the grain produced by the router tracks. These are not normally seen with the naked eye. The photo enlargement helps bring this detail out.

[View with PicLens]

This is the hearld of the Saint Louis and San Franciso Railroad, AKA the FRISCO line. If you have any doubt it is called the coonskin, read this documentation. It is also the name and emblem of the city in Texas where I live.

What I did here was take the business card a fireman from the City of Frisco, Texas gave us after we had our lightning strike (and fire) back in 2009. I put the card in my scanner and turned it into a digital image. From there I put the image into Vectric’s Aspire software where I converted the graphic into vector graphics.

One picture was created by the software showing exactly what the logo will look like when it is cut on a CNC router machine. The real parts have not been made but the picture looks very real. The other pictures shows two examples of the final parts and includes the business card from which they were designed.

Of course now the coonskin can be carved in any size my machine can handle.

[View with PicLens]

The title has a double meaning. All radio stations have a “callsign”. These are call signs for the owners of amateur radio callsigns. They are plaques to hang on the wall. Most amateur operators are rather proud of their calls and like to show them off at their operating positions or at work and elsewhere.

I design these first in software, simulate the carving then export to my shop computer system. These are made from a 5″ x 10″ x 3/4″ red oak plank and carved by my HB2 CNC router machine. Then each one is sanded, detailed and hand finished by me. These three are hand rubbed Tung oil finish.

This is the type of work of which I am interested in doing more. Anyone having a carving project like this they would like to have done, don’t hesitate in contacting me for more information.