Post by mirthmgr on Nov 3, 2017 13:02:20 GMT
While waiting for some carving mills to come in, I decided to play around a bit with cutting some simple pockets and filling them in with resin. I'm pretty pleased with the results:
And, filled in with resin:
I'm sending this to my folks as a little Thanksgiving trinket, but I wanted to share it with you guys, too, as I owe quite a few of you a big thank you for sharing very helpful info in the forums. Thanks!
In later projects, I'll probably try giving the pockets a quick coat of white paint before I pour the resin. The walnut is dark enough that the colors don't pop very much (the orange on the "Thanks" is an almost neon orange pearl on a light surface). I'm using Pearl Ex pigments, in case anyone's curious (they look stunning in resin). I actually didn't intend to coat the entire surface in resin when I began, but I had a couple of sloppy pours into the pockets and had to wipe them up. There is no actual wiping up of resin, in my experience (at least not on a porous surface), so I just got rid of the color as best I could and topped it off with the flood pour. In the end, I'm glad I did, as my folks can now use it on an exterior door and it should survive the elements for quite some time. I did goof a bit in my CAM setup; I was going to carve this out of soft wood, and set up my pocket operation accordingly. When I switched the basswood for walnut, I remembered to adjust the feed rate, but I completely blanked on changing the depth of cut. I'm guessing that this is why I ended up losing a few small details (chipping on the legs of the "n", the stem of the "k", and the center of the "s"). Another lesson learned!
There was a little weirdness when I initially imported the SVG I had created. I use Illustrator, so that could have something to do with it (Adobe does a few weird things with SVGs), but when I imported it into Fusion, the centers of the flowers and all of the hollow letters (a, k, s) had their upper-right vertices about 100mm off in both the X and Y directions. I ended up splitting the SVG into two files, with the problem parts in their own file. They seem to import at a constant size (not correct, but they always seem to need the same 1.333~ scaling), so it was easy enough to get them to line up. I'll have to do some more experimentation (maybe compound paths in Illustrator cause weird things... but that wouldn't explain the simple circles in the centers of the flowers), so I'll share what I find if I'm able to come to any conclusion.
And, filled in with resin:
I'm sending this to my folks as a little Thanksgiving trinket, but I wanted to share it with you guys, too, as I owe quite a few of you a big thank you for sharing very helpful info in the forums. Thanks!
In later projects, I'll probably try giving the pockets a quick coat of white paint before I pour the resin. The walnut is dark enough that the colors don't pop very much (the orange on the "Thanks" is an almost neon orange pearl on a light surface). I'm using Pearl Ex pigments, in case anyone's curious (they look stunning in resin). I actually didn't intend to coat the entire surface in resin when I began, but I had a couple of sloppy pours into the pockets and had to wipe them up. There is no actual wiping up of resin, in my experience (at least not on a porous surface), so I just got rid of the color as best I could and topped it off with the flood pour. In the end, I'm glad I did, as my folks can now use it on an exterior door and it should survive the elements for quite some time. I did goof a bit in my CAM setup; I was going to carve this out of soft wood, and set up my pocket operation accordingly. When I switched the basswood for walnut, I remembered to adjust the feed rate, but I completely blanked on changing the depth of cut. I'm guessing that this is why I ended up losing a few small details (chipping on the legs of the "n", the stem of the "k", and the center of the "s"). Another lesson learned!
There was a little weirdness when I initially imported the SVG I had created. I use Illustrator, so that could have something to do with it (Adobe does a few weird things with SVGs), but when I imported it into Fusion, the centers of the flowers and all of the hollow letters (a, k, s) had their upper-right vertices about 100mm off in both the X and Y directions. I ended up splitting the SVG into two files, with the problem parts in their own file. They seem to import at a constant size (not correct, but they always seem to need the same 1.333~ scaling), so it was easy enough to get them to line up. I'll have to do some more experimentation (maybe compound paths in Illustrator cause weird things... but that wouldn't explain the simple circles in the centers of the flowers), so I'll share what I find if I'm able to come to any conclusion.
